Coxing Leadership Program

You will be placed on the applicant list for this program when you register by submitting the $895 deposit and your initial information/application.

If you are not accepted, we will work to find you a slot elsewhere or provide a full refund.

If you complete the admissions process (see above) and are accepted for a slot in this program, we will send you an acceptance letter. If you are accepted:

• Full payment is due by March 1
• $395 of the $895 deposit is refundable until March 1
• We strongly recommend purchasing travel insurance with cancel for any reason coverage within 21 days of receiving your acceptance letter to protect your camp purchase and any applicable travel after March 1.
  • Sparks offers travel protection plans from TravelSafe. Learn more about travel protection here
    • You can cover the deposit initially then add the full cost of the program and flight later.
    • The policy will also cover 75% of the $500 non-refundable part of the deposit in the case you withdraw prior to March 1.
      
• If you do not complete the written application and schedule your interview within 30 days of deposit, $395 of $895 remains refundable until March 1.

• If you withdraw after March 1, 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.

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 refund. We recommend buying your flight after March 1.

We are the only camp 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 at camp 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. These qualities along with our values of growth, kaizen, and plus one stroke dictate the culture our camp community forms around. Our focus is on utilizing rowing to create the self-awareness necessary to master one's relationship with performance.

First, Holland is an incredibly small coxswain cohort to have a dedicated coach - 6 coxswains. Second, coxswains will have access to rented athletes similar to our domestic camps such that on-water training may be focused on them. Third, you race in the Dutch senior and junior national championships. We could go on about individual attention, improvement, supportive peers, and fun - but we hope you get the picture!

100% engagement with the sport, a prior relationship with rowing performance, and a strong desire to improve in coaching yourself are pre-cursors to success at our leadership level coxswain camps. As with all of our leadership level programs: what you put in is what you'll get out.

Experience levels vary, but average around 2.5 years. Given the level of applied critical thinking necessary, successful applicants tend to be older. Adaptability and resilience are critical to mastering the art of using your awareness to inform your coxing performance.

The goal of this camp is for you to improve in how you coach yourself to perform. As a result: we seek thoughtful, courageous individuals who desire challenge in their relationship with rowing performance in order to grow as athletes and people.

We are selective in our admissions process for this program - ability to negotiate a foreign rowing culture and successfully implement a process of improvement over two weeks requires a familiarity with coxing that goes beyond many juniors. Beyond that, we expect athletes to have the coxing self-awareness to know their strengths and weaknesses and actively communicate with coaching staff in addressing their improvement. The size of this program and the availability of coaching makes it imperative that students participate in driving their learning process.

Ideal candidates will be adaptable and excellent communicators given the need for the skills in coxing success. Coxswains who wish to apply must by necessity be more mature in their daily comportment and decision-making than the average high school athlete.

Finally, we also consider your ability to live, train, and support others in a community committed to utilizing challenge for personal growth. Sparks camps are unlike traditional training camps in that progress in self-awareness per your relationship with performance is as important as acute technical progress. Ideal candidates will complete the program with gains in both self-awareness and corresponding leadership ability as well as higher coxing and racing IQs.

We welcome your questions either via phone or in the chat box in the right hand corner.

We do not offer discounts on our Coxing Leadership Programs.

Regarding Scholarships:

Please see this link to our NCAA Compliance webpage.

It's important to say that coxswain recruiting is no piece of cake regardless of who you are or what you've done.

First and foremost: you need excellent academics. Coxswains are given slots to selective institutions, but their ability to raise class average is often leveraged to the disadvantage of coxswains with average grades.

Second, you need a level of experience that makes collegiate recruiters feel confident in your management ability specific to their teams. This is partially about what we call "coxing IQ" - and we can help you with that at camp, but by no means does working with us guarantee a high success rate with recruiting. Your ability to communicate effectively with recruiters dictates as much about coxswain recruiting success as your experiences.

Regardless, rising Division I scholarship athletes have attended this camp. We have had a number of program alumni who have been recruited on the Division I level - and even receive scholarship dollars for coxing, which is a true rarity - but our belief is that recruiting is a byproduct of a deep relationship with the sport and appropriate school "fit."

You can come to Holland and learn a lot more about coxing, improve tremendously, and be able to speak with recruiters with far more rowing IQ than other recruits, but you will still have some miles to go to lock that slot down given how competitive coxswain recruiting is. We're excited to cheer you on!

The cohort size is six coxswains, with one dedicated coach and operations staffer - for a 1:3 staff to coxswain ratio.

The cohort combines with our Dutch Racing program (12 rowers) for group activities, lodging and meals. Total group size maxes at 18, with three coaches and three operations staffers - maintaining a 1:3 staff to camper ratio.

At Sparks, we have reflected deeply on optimal group size for camp type and length after over a decade of running rowing camps. The standard in the outdoors education (e.g. hiking trips) is 12 campers at a 1:6 ratio with staff, who are generally undergraduates. We have improved this model for this camp with a larger overall group size for a better team feel while pushing ratios down with highly qualified staff to better affect consistent performance.

Campers lodge in far south Amsterdam at an IBIS hotel and are combined with our rowing program to form a maximum group size of 18. We ride bikes throughout the city, which is the defacto Dutch mode of transportation (campers go through "bike safety school" at the start of the program)

At Sparks camps, 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. We seek to maintain industry-leading 1:3 staff to student ratios at this program.

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

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 seek to help families connect who would like their students to travel together, but there are a lot of ways to fly direct to Amsterdam's Schipol (AMS). We provide a direct flight from a major US hub for campers interested in traveling together.

The journey itself is part of the experience. Our Program Director (already on the ground in Holland as students depart) tracks student travel into Amsterdam, where they are picked up from the airport.

You will fill out a travel form after registration that enables our staff to make sure your camper arrives and departs camp safely.

If your camper needs to depart the day after camp ends, we will place a staff member at the CitizenM Schipol Airport that night; you can register for this option when you provide travel details. Staff cannot be responsible for campers as the camp will have ended, but they will be able to help your camper get checked into the hotel and answer questions.

If you have questions, we're happy to answer them in the box in the lower right side, or you can schedule a call with us.

Certainly - we completely understand your need to connect about this commitment!

We just ask you schedule a call with us (click here) given we're a very small office.

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