Cambridge International Challenge

Camp purchases are fully refundable minus transaction fees until March 1 for summer camps.

• We strongly recommend you purchase travel protection with cancel for any reason coverage.
  • We offer these plans from Travel Insured International during the check-out process for our four and five day camps and during final balance payment for deposit-based multi-week camps.
  • Learn more about travel protection here
    
    
• If you withdraw after the above dates, there are no refunds for any reason whatsoever (including, but not limited to: voluntary withdraw, illness or injury, summer school, security concerns or other reasons).
  
  
• If your camper leaves camp after it starts, there are no refunds for any reason whatsoever, including but not limited to: voluntary withdrawal, illness or injury, dismissal by Sparks (due to discipline, behavior, lack of fitness or motivation, etc.) security concerns, or any other reason. Any costs incurred by Sparks as a result of an early departure are the sole responsibility of the parents.
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• In the unlikely case a camp does not proceed, we'll work to notify you by March 1. You'll be offered a different program or a refund. In some cases, we may extend the 'go, no-go' date. We recommend buying your flight after March 1 or later, if we advise.

We offer discounted prices for "early bird" registrations prior to January 31.

Regarding Bursaries:

Please see this link to our NCAA Compliance webpage. (Please note: we refer to bursaries as "scholarships" here.)

The Cambridge course differs from our US four day university courses in that the average level of athlete experience will be higher given UK juniors typically start earlier and race in smaller boats more often - thus our intense focus on progression from junior to senior rowing rather than connection with the sport.

We require coxswains to have one season of experience or more and offer six to eight slots.

Once you arrive at Cambridge, you'll be put through an assessment the first day to place you with a group that will work best for you.  

Please feel free to read in detail about our coxswain curriculum here.

We are the only rowing course company in rowing with a full-time staff that has academic and professional backgrounds in experiential education. We also have a summer operations staff (many are returners that teach during the school year) who buy into the idea of personal growth during our courses not just for campers - but for themselves as well.

The result is a culture sincerely committed to the power of rowing as a personally transformative experience built on vulnerability, thoughtfulness, responsibility, and initiative.

This does not mean other courses are relatively inferior; in fact, we feel such a perspective is not helpful. The course needs to fit the athlete. Our focus is on utilizing rowing to create self-awareness for our community.

The overwhelming majority of the coaching staff at CUBC will possess coaching backgrounds with the GB, US, Dutch, or Canadian national teams; it will be a mix of British and Americans with a Canadian or Dutch coach thrown in for good measure. The Americans will also be senior professional coaches from US universities.

At Sparks, home club (CUBC) coaches are offered first choice on slots followed by coaches in the Sparks rowing course network. If you have a question about a particular coach, click the intercom button in the bottom right corner and ask us! We then fill the remaining slots with the highest level of coaching talent available worldwide. This has generally been Olympic medalists, national team coaches, university educators of solid repute, and one ten time Olympic coach.

We take the quality of our educational staff extremely seriously at Sparks. We do not value being an Olympian or a senior US university coach in itself but instead seek to hire coaches who are first talented educationally and second passionate about the sport. If you throw in Olympic experience on top of that, then that helps too!

Per NCAA rules (the governing body for US university sports), recruiting or speaking in specifics about institutional recruiting policies is not a part of the course. Participants may speak about the overall process and ask coaches' opinions on specific steps of their journey (i.e. 2K development) and the general US experience, but may not inquire as to their possibilities at the coaches' programs during the course. After the course officially concludes on the last day, it is possible to speak to a coach at that point specifically in regard to their institution.

Coaches all have their own style of pedagogy. Part of the course should be to experience the differences in those styles such that participants may better understand the way coaching staff manage and connect with the sport for their own benefit.

Sparks runs a recruiting webinar each Fall for alumni with seasoned rowing recruiting and academic university advising experts (including those with specific UK-US expertise) for parents and camp alumni.

We employ safety and risk management practices from the adventure education industry, where some risk is inherent but must be quantified insofar as educational value. These practices are initially employed in program design and we work hard to train operations staff to seek to maintain an awareness of specific risks at all times. No outdoors programming can guarantee safety, however professional management of risk is key to the art of providing consistently excellent experiential education programming.

Please also see our essential eligibility criteria here.  

We are happy to partner with Fitzwilliam College for our camp at Cambridge.

Each student will have his or her own room with shared en-suite. We will also take meals at the college.

We provide train station pick-ups for Cambridge the morning of camp. In the case you can utilize London Stansted Airport, there is a direct train from the airport available to Cambridge - the journey is 30 minutes. Please arrange for your train to arrive prior to 12:30 PM.

Heathrow Airport is 90 minutes southwest of Cambridge, and we don't provide direct pickups. However, we advise:

1. Avoid arriving on the morning of camp, especially from different time zones, to prevent fatigue. If coming solely for camp, plan to arrive a day early and possibly leave a day after.

2. To travel from Heathrow to Cambridge, consider private car services, trains, or the National Express bus, which runs five times daily.

3. We can suggest accommodations in Cambridge for the night before camp starts. Our staff will be there, but we only offer emergency support before camp begins.

At Sparks courses, we have two staffs: a coaching staff and an operations staff. Our operations staff is responsible for the experiential education and pastoral care at camp. It is made up secondary school educators (Program Leaders) and current student-athlete alumni (Associate Program Leaders) who are led by an experienced Program Director. Operations staff chose to work at Sparks courses both as an active exercise in educational leadership development and to discuss rowing with the coaching staff.

The staff lives amongst the student athletes, and has oversight 24 hours a day. Unhealthy substances and/or behaviors are strictly prohibited.

Check-In is 1 PM - 2 PM on the first day at Fitzwilliam College

The course ends at 1 PM on the last day at the CUBC Boathouse in Ely

Times for non-residential (day) participants generally run from 8 AM to 8 PM

More specific information is available in the FAQ for Registered Campers on the camper forms dashboard - though we're always available in the lower right hand corner for questions.

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Course forms are issued at least six weeks prior to camp on our site via your dashboard.

Certainly!

If you have an logistical or informational question, feel free to use the live chat in the bottom right corner. We can generally turn these around quickly.

If you want to speak with a real, live human - that's also possible! We just ask you schedule a call with us (click here) given we're a very small office.