Sports Xplore camp at Hood College offers kids a chance to try a variety of different athletic activities
Jun. 20—Sam Toll had never played lacrosse, much less picked up a stick before Tuesday morning.
The seventh-grader from West Virginia's Frankfort Middle School is a soccer and ice hockey player but was participating in a new variety sports camp at Hood College that gave him the chance to try a different stick-and-ball activity.
But after a two-hour drill session on the turf, Toll might have a new favorite sport.
"It's really fun because I like the shooting of it. I like the passing. It's really neat," Toll said. "Once you start playing it ... you want to keep doing it."
That's exactly the kind of experience Hood athletic director Sue Kolb had in mind when she came up with the idea of Sports Xplore, the camp which is now in its inaugural year.
She wanted to offer an array of sports across a one-week camp with the hope that kids would get out of the house and away from screens while finding a new physical activity they love. It's a passion derived from her background as a youth soccer coach and a Bachelor's degree in elementary education.
"I think too often, we're trying to force kids to pick a sport, even at the youngest ages, and I don't think that's a good idea for several reasons, for their mental well-being, for their physical burnout," Kolb said.
That message resonated with families in the region, more than she expected.
Kolb said she planned for 100 elementary and middle school-aged children to sign up. Instead, there are 352 participating this week, and she said they had to turn some prospective registrants away since they didn't have the resources to handle such an influx of campers.
In future years, Kolb said she plans to add additional weeks of the camp to accommodate everyone.
"The focus of the camp hit people who wanted to send their kids to try more sports," Kolb said.
That was true of the parents of rising sixth-grader Tyler Houck. They heard about the camp through a mutual friend of Kolb and told Houck about the opportunity.
He responded enthusiastically.
"I was like, 'Yeah, I really want to go because there's so many new people here and I can make new friends,'" Houck said.
So far, he's done that. And Houck, like Toll, took a quick interest in lacrosse.
Houck is a soccer and basketball player who attends Mount Savage School in Allegany County and found enjoyment from the start of the week with baseball and volleyball. Later in the week, he and the other campers will play tennis, soccer, basketball and golf.
"There's so many other things like lacrosse, I wouldn't have gotten to play [otherwise], which I got to do today and that was really fun, and then I get to go learn how to swim," Houck said, referring to the swimming part of the camp.
But the lacrosse skills Houck learned — picking up ground balls, shooting and passing — gave him a newfound appreciation for the sport, as it did for those who tried their hand at it in the afternoon.
Some cradled the ball like the pros, while others did so more haphazardly but with a smile on their face nonetheless. That's all that Kolb could've wanted.
"I really wanted to design this because I didn't think anyone else would be [doing this]. There was no competition," Kolb said. "I thought this would be a really unique opportunity that no one else was offering, at least in this area. That's why I think there were so many numbers in the first year."
