Italian Training 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 Scholarships:

Please see this link to our NCAA Compliance webpage.

No 2K score or specific level of coxing ability is required for this camp. We allow coxswains on this program, but they must be willing to partake in all physical activities - including rowing small boats.

Ability levels in the group will differ - but that is why we maintain a low staff to student ratio. What matters is not your ability relative to the others in the group, but rather your desire to accurately evaluate your performance and plan to improve.

As a result, while this camp requires a higher level of maturity and thoughtfulness with some athletic experience - specific rowing ability is less important.

Insofar as cooking skill, none is required - however students must commit to the program with the intention of investing in their cooking skills. Prior cooking experience is therefore utilized as an indicator of potential engagement in the admissions process.

Our admissions process is the most thoughtful in the sport and we evaluate each athlete on a case by case basis.

While we look 2K and rowing experience, we are also very interested in your motivation and passion for rowing. At our camps, the drive to improve leads to increased maturity and thoughtfulness - which leads to performance.

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 ability to improve long after camp ends.

Italy is designed for athletes who seek to better define their relationship with performance utilizing cooking as a primary activity alongside rowing. You do not have to be a high performer relative to others, but you should be interested in how you might define peak performance for yourself. To be clear: we are not a performance "boot camp" whereby students are pushed beyond themselves so much as an opportunity for students to unlock the mechanisms that contribute to performance within themselves in a community committed to doing the same in a thoughtful, intelligent manner.

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

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.

In Italy, we seek to provide two avenues of growth and adventure: rowing and cooking. Both are mediums for expression, technical skill, and performance - and both can be highly rewarding in those regards!

Engaging in gaining a unique understanding of how nutrition fits with training will increase your rowing IQ.

That said, how you apply your rowing IQ in your pursuit of the sport after camp ends is what will differentiate you in the recruiting process.

Training and racing overseas will speak to some recruiters more than others, but after academics and erg scores are sorted - recruiters care more about your personal engagement with the sport than the particulars of your summer program choice or race results. Given recruiting is a globally competitive "talent marketplace", getting some international perspective will help you - but in the end no one race or camp is going to provide the competitive rowing intellect necessary to succeed at the recruiting process. You are a composite of your experiences - so best to make them unique and highly educational.

Sparks multi-week cohorts are typically between 12 and 16 athletes. Coaching and operations staff ratios are set at 1:6, making overall staff to student ratio 1:3 - however, sometimes it is even lower.

Of chief importance to us is the quality of our cohorts - which we believe is a product of admissions, staffing, and group size to facilitate activities (eg. sweep boat rowing v. singles) as well as friendships that last long after camp ends.

We seek the highest international-quality level in coaching staff and our senior operations staff is made up of former rowers turned educators with a number of years of prior experience in our camp system; many hold graduate degrees in education.

Campers will stay the majority of the program in a three star hotel with kitchen facilities that is a ten minute walk from the boat club except for one night in a farm stay near Mount Blanc.  

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. In Italy, we seek a 1:3 overall staff to student ratio.

The Program Director lives amongst the student 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.  

Flights arrive and depart out of Milan Malpensa (MXP). We seek to help families connect who would like their students to travel together. The journey itself is part of the experience and our international camps invite athletes to take a personal journey with sport at its center.

Our Program Director (already on the ground in Italy as students depart) tracks student travel into Milan, where they are picked up from the airport. In the case you will arrive in Italy as a family and drop your camper off, we will meet at the hotel in Turin.

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

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.

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

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.