Last week I was an overnight sports camp councilor for the BYU sports camps, specifically the basketball camp. As an overnight councilor I got to spend the night in the dorms with the girls and make sure they were safe and present for activities: night games, dances, activities I wanted to do, and the like. We were even supposed to go to Seven Peaks on Wednesday, although we ended up getting rained out. But the overall experience was the best I've had thus far this summer.
I ended up having 17 girls that I was in charge of, which compared to past weeks was a lot! It took me 3 days to get all their names down and which room they were staying in and who was roommates with whom. But the youngest girl was 12, and rooming with her sister, so they were pretty forgiving of the fact that I didn't have their names down right away. and by the time I got everyone's name down, we were having a lot of fun hanging out and having fun with each other. In fact, we took more selfies (groupies?) than I've ever taken in one week.
It seemed like any time we started taking pictures, people would just run up and join in. Some of the time, that's what I did myself.
These two girls were crazy and so much fun. I think they said this was their third year at the basketball camp, so they knew what was up and how to have a good time.
when we went to the dance on Tuesday, we just went crazy dancing and such.
My girls said they had never had as much fun at a dance before in their lives. I had promised them a good time, so I'm glad we all had fun singing and dancing along to the music and seeing what everyone could do.
this is most of my girls. we were waiting for the buses to take us to Seven Peaks. We waited even longer for them to pick us up after lightning forced the park closed.
One of my main duties was to have a nightly devotional. I started out the week studying hard and trying to figure out the best topics and stories and scriptures to share, but the last night I ran out of time to think of something great. I had a topic in mind, but when I mentioned I didn't have anything specific planned, one of the girls pipped up and offered to give the devotional. She opened my scriptures app to the topic of Humility that I had been thinking about sharing, and decided to read the underlined portions. She didn't really know what the paragraphs were all about, so just reading the underlined parts was really non-sequitor, but I was glad I had read through it before so I could help explain things. The best part of that devotional was the willingness of my camper to pitch in and help me share a spiritual thought.
To understand this next episode, I guess you need a little bit of information. I had 17 girls, but I shared a room with another councilor who also had at least 15 girls on our floor. Because we were councilors we got Master Keys that opened every room, just in case a girl got locked out. But on Wednesday my roommate went jogging and got her things stolen--including the master key issued to her. this meant that they had to re-key the ENTIRE floor, which took a bit of time. They were hoping to get it all done while we were at Seven Peaks, but when we got back early, they were not prepared, so we spent about an hour in the Cannon Center waiting for them to issue everyone new keys. While we were waiting, we danced, we had a handstand contest, I challenged another councilor to a pushup contest, and we just hung out with everyone. I had a lot of fun even though I know some of the girls were really impatient to get their keys and return to their rooms to change.
But after we all got our keys, I had promised to take the girls to the snow cone shack across the street. It was a kind of bad idea on many accounts, once we got there: we waited in line for an hour and a half, during which we got over 100 cars to honk at us, and by the time we got our snow cones it was about time to head back to the hall for devotional. Plus I had forgotten how sugar can affect already excitable girls. Even some of the girls that didn't get snow cones seemed affected, running around, jumping on beds (See here), and unable to quiet down for devotional (See here). I let them remain rowdy for a while, hoping they would wear themselves out quickly, but it took much longer than I expected. My one real consolation was that my supervisor was on our floor and seemed ok with what the girls were doing. although she left as they started chucking grapes at each other with enough force to explode on contact. If I hadn't been worried about clean up after they were finally done, I would have left as well. But they finally tired of throwing grapes, and I got them to clean up the hall, and then they went to bed.
I seriously LOVED being a sports camp councilor, and I think my girls enjoyed having me as a councilor. I gained a lot of new instagram followers and a lot of new friends. If I wasn't going to China tomorrow, I would have been a sports camp councilor this week as well, and probably would have had just as much fun, in very different activities, with a new set of girls. But I think China will be an even bigger adventure!
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