Japanese 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.

It is the desire to use rowing to gain a greater perspective on how you relate to yourself and the world that characterizes ideal Japan program athletes. Your ability to use rowing for these purposes will also be reflected in your ability to guide your rowing performance after the program ends, so we do seek motivated athletes.

Talent is relative: a fast junior will not stack up to a fast collegiate athlete. The rowing aspect of this program mandates intelligence, thoughtfulness, responsibility, and humility.

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.

Japan requires students possess the maturity to remain open to large amounts of reflection and mental exertion in order to improve their approach to performance. They also must be able to keep up with the group during the training sessions when in small boats. As a result, we primarily seek "thoughtful drive" (i.e. the maturity and desire to intake an process a large amount of information in a short period), a degree of self-awareness that powers that drive, and 1-2 seasons of competitive rowing experience (and equivalent fitness) for this program.

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

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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.

Japan is the only rowing camp for juniors in the world that offers the opportunity to unite the study of mindfulness with rowing and connect with a completely different culture based on a shared love of rowing. One of the Sparks company values is Japanese: the concept of "Kaizen" implies the idea of continual pursuit of perfection without ever achieving it. This is what we do every time we put the oar in the water. The program is based on sharing this value across a large cultural divide in order to enable student growth and perspective.

Learning in-depth mental skills in Japan that have a following amongst college rowing coaches can stick out on a resume - but you will need to be able to apply them long after the camp has ended if they're to have impact in the recruiting process.

After recruiters take your academics and erg score into account, coaches may be interested to hear about how you pursue rowing as a sample of your resiliency and character.

What you take from this program is meant to help you in that pursuit.

Japan is an opportunity to challenge yourself to grow based on being in a completely foreign place. It's also an opportunity to be a student of the sport and the mental skills inherent to developing as a rowing athlete in order to pursue rowing with the mental framework to advance faster in the sport.

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.

Students are housed in western style accomodations in Kyoto and Tokyo.

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 Japan, we generally have one coach and two operations staff for 12 athletes.

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.  

The commitment is a long flight. The positive news is that getting to Tokyo on a near direct routing is not difficult to do.

We prefer students fly into Haneda airport (HND) as it's smaller and therefore easier for us to collect them. It's also closer to the city.

The journey itself is part of the camp experience. This camp invites athletes to take a personal journey with the sport at its center. While getting to Tokyo is not as complex as the South Island of New Zealand, the flight is long and the distance is felt.

Our Program Director (already on the ground in Japan as students arrive) tracks student travel into Tokyo, where they pick campers up from the airport.

Needless to say, 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.

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.