Sports Camp

This past week, our church had its annual Sports Camp! Instead of a typical VBS, our church does a sports camp and focuses a lot on outreach. Being the “newbies” at church, we didn’t quite know what to expect, but we had such a great week! The theme for the week was “Whatever” with our theme verse being 1 Corinthians 10:31 (“So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”) We did four sports over the week: basketball, soccer, baseball, and cheer. Total, we had about 170 kids attend each night. Only about a third of those came from our church. A lot of the kids were bused in from a housing project in a different part of town. 

Those kids arrived quite early, and would get a little too rowdy. We tried to organize them into some games to pass the time until it was time to start.

Photo Credit: Roma.

The night always started off with an opening rally. Each group sat according to their sport. They got to watch a picture slideshow from the day before, until the emcees came up and opened the evening.

They would usually have some kind of game to get the kids up on their feet and get some energy out. J

They also did some hilarious skits which all involved audience participation.

After that, they would have one of the leaders speak about the theme for the night. Our four themes were: Respect, Integrity, Hard Work, and Team Work. After the short lesson, the kids would break up and go to their respective areas to work on their sport of choice. Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures of all the sports because I was only helping in one and couldn’t just walk around and take pictures at my pleasure. J But Ben helped out with the basketball, Rubia helped with the mini-camp for the worker’s preschoolers, Mom helped out with concessions, and Roma and I helped with baseball while Josiah participated.
 

Each night was broken down into four 20-minute sessions. Two of those sessions were spent working on the sports drills, one of them was spent in “huddle groups” (a time to further discuss the day’s theme), and one was spent eating snack and drinking lots of water (the temps were over 90 every night.)

We had about 40 kids doing baseball each night. About 15 of them were kindergarteners. J Working with them required an extra measure of patience because all they want to do is swing the bat!

Each night ended with a closing rally indoors, which was much shorter than the opening. We did this Monday through Thursday. Friday ended with a celebration at the local splash park (more on that tomorrow!)