Mentors matter

Dec 19th, 2024

PSA for all camp staff: Capture the Flag isn’t about getting that small piece of cloth across the line for the win.

In fact, playing Capture the Flag isn’t about winning at all.

I had legit no idea about this. Clueless for years.

Until I was 16 years old and met Pat Maguire, who, at the time, was wise and worldly in a way I could never hope to be. He was 19 years old.

We sat there side-by-side at Camp Stella Maris, watching a game of Capture the Flag play out, when another counselor sprinted past with the prize, leaving a bunch of disappointed campers in his dust.

Pat shook his head with frustration, turning to me and saying, “Man, this is so easy. Get a bunch of kids together. Give them a huge pump-up speech. Create a memory. And then be the first one caught. That’s how you play Capture the Flag.”

It was the most important piece of mentorship the 16-year-old version of me ever got. It remains one of the most impactful things I’ve ever learned.

Mentorship Has Meaning

Pat teaching a young Jack Schott how to handle the golf cartPat’s advice was sage-like in its simplicity, so it was easy to take in. It also helped that Pat was the coolest guy at camp, crazy funny, and everyone (campers, counselors, directors, everyone) liked him.

We would go on to become great friends and work together as peers. I still consider him to be one of my first mentors.

In a world with many top-down hierarchies, it’s super tough to find a place for mentorship, or at least the way I think about the word.

To me, mentorship isn’t about being sat down and told what to do but rather watching and hearing how someone you respect sees and interacts with the world. And then, after that, trying to be more like that person in a way you feel comfortable.

A mentor and mentee relationship is formed when people, along similar paths, meet, interact, share, talk, listen, grow, and learn alongside each other. And in this relationship, one of those people has a slightly more expansive view of the situation while also speaking very much the same language.

They are “looked up to” not because they’ve instructed you to listen but because they’ve earned the right to be heard.

I repeat: They’ve earned the right to be heard.

Summer camp is one of the best places to find this.

I took Pat’s words about Capture the Flag to heart not because I was instructed to, but because I understood a very simple equation in my head. I couldn’t have sketched it out at the time, but it looked like this:

This, in all of its simplicity, is mentorship. And something I strive for everywhere.

Luckily, camp builds so much of it in place already.

And when teaching your staff this concept, it might include showing them they actually care about the kids. The “being cool” is already mostly baked in with teenagers working with younger campers.

Easy ways to show kids you care:

→ Know each one of their names

→ When a camper mentions something they like, ask a follow-up question or just say, “WOAH! Tell me more about that!”

→ Tell them. Just say, “You know, I really like being your counselor.”

→ Have one ritual every day where each person in the group shares something. Rose-bud-thorn, grateful circle, whatever works for your camp.

We Don’t Blindly Listen

Camps work perfectly for mentorship across the entire spectrum for a bunch of different reasons.

For starters, like Pat and I, the age gap isn’t so wide where people are speaking all different generational languages.

Counselors, for all of their maturity, aren’t all that much older than the campers themselves. For many campers, this is their chance to interact with a teenager (which just means cool) in a way the rest of the world doesn’t provide.

Camp is a Mentorship Lab

The same works for different ranks of counselors and even up to directors.

Just logistically, camps check all kinds of boxes that school, home, sports teams, dance companies, or bands just can’t do. Those places have too many barriers in place.

Plus, the culture around camps means creating a place where earning the right to give advice comes with the territory. This, more than anything else, is the critical piece when it comes to mentorship.

And you earn that right by giving a shit. It’s that simple.

Camps breed a culture where caring is the ultimate currency.

Mentorship means caring for and then schooling those who will eventually take your place because you care about the place itself.

Kids and even adults want to see the world through the same lens as the people they respect. They want guidance about how to be a good person by watching it in action from people they look up to.

Camps have this built-in not only in the everyday schedule (through every activity under the sun) but also in the hidden language of the camp itself.

Where else can we find this?

Again, like I asked last week about finding your inner voice, I really want to know. I don’t think it exists, at least not in such an organic way.

The Need For Mentors

I’m going to write a ton more about mentorship in the coming weeks and months. It might become one of the camp pillars I end up standing on. I truly believe more kids would end up at camp if more camps leaned into this with their messaging.

We need more yous. More people kids look up to who give a shit about them and show them what giving a shit about other people looks like in the small and large moments

We need more mentors in the world. We need more mentees in the world. We need more places to have those relationships happen. We need more Pat Maguires.

We need more places like camp, where winning Capture the Flag has nothing to do with the Flag itself.

It has everything thing to do with the message you send as a mentor. And how you receive it from those you respect the most.

You got this,

Jack