Sparks Penn

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 to protect your camp purchase and any applicable travel.
  • Sparks offers travel protection plans from TII. Learn more about travel protection here
    • In the case you withdraw from camp prior to March 1 and receive a full refund, you can also receive a refund on the policy.
      
      
• 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 for Sparks summer camps. You’ll be offered a different program or refund. We recommend buying your flight after March 1.

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

Regarding Scholarships:

Please see this link to our NCAA Compliance webpage.

Our collegiate introductory camps support the widest range of camper experience levels - from folks starting the sport to active Division I recruits. That said, camper experience averages at about one year (2 seasons) of competitive rowing experience.

If you've never rowed or coxed before, we provide ten Learn To Row slots per camp session for students who possess athletic backgrounds, focus, and the comfort to engage intensively with their own staff and schedule.

For experienced athletes: we require coxswains to have one season of experience or more and offer twelve slots with a dedicated coach and curriculum. We ask both experienced men and women to have one season of experience or more and typically average three experienced eights per gender.

Once you get to camp, you'll be put through an assessment the first day to place you with a group that will work best for you - so don't worry about whether you're good enough (or potentially, "too good" ;) ) for camp.

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

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.

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

The objective at our introductory collegiate camps is to educate and inspire, so we suggest seeking fit for your goal set. The difference is in the coaching staff and location. We advise using the camp to get inspired insofar as collegiate environments, and as such it would be best to choose one that might be on your school list at some point. Different venues may also feature different attractions from a rowing perspective. Beyond that, coaching staffs differ per camp and some students seek to connect with particular coaches.

At Sparks, home school coaches are given first priority for slots followed by partner school coaches from our network of collegiate camps - this results in a mix of coaches from these schools. (If you have a question about a particular coach, click the intercom button in the bottom right corner and ask us!)

We fill any remaining slots with the highest level of coaching talent available worldwide. This has generally been coaches from Holland and England, Olympic medalists, collegiate educators of solid repute, and one five time Olympic coach.

We take the quality of our educational staff extremely seriously at Sparks. We do not value being an Olympian or a Division I 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!

We reserve a very small grouping of slots at each camp for the learn to row/cox section.

The group receives its own dedicated coach for the week and is oriented to the sport we love.

Ideal Learn To Row/Cox athletes have prior athletic background, and will be taken where they are and taught from the ground up.

Per NCAA rules, recruiting or speaking in specifics about institutional recruiting policies is not a part of camp. Campers may speak about the overall process and ask coaches' opinions on specific steps of their journey (i.e. 2K development), but may not inquire as to their possibilities at the coaches' programs during camp.

Coaches all have their own style of pedagogy. Part of camp should be to experience the differences in those styles such that campers may better understand the way coaching staff manage and connect with the sport for their own benefit. Campers will have the chance to speak with coaches per their recruiting questions multiple times during camp.

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 provide airport pickup and drop-off for solo-flying campers. A staff member will meet them upon arrival, group them for Uber transport to camp, and ensure their return to the airport via Uber after camp. Please schedule arrival flights by 12:30pm on the first day and departure flights after 4pm on the last day. Register for this service through the camp dashboard.

• Registration is 1 PM - 2 PM on the first day of camp
• Camp ends at 1 PM on the last day of camp
• Airport transfers at Penn are complimentary
• Train station pick-ups are possible within similar timeframes to the above; please coordinate with our staff in the lower right hand corner chat box.

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

Registration is 1 PM - 2 PM on the first day of camp

Camp ends at 1 PM on the last day of camp

Times for Day Campers 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.

The Penn Dorms have air-conditioning. Campers are housed two to a room with an ensuite bathroom.

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. 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 camps 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.

Given our desire to meet and mix in our short time together, Sparks only permits an extremely limited number of "buddy pairs" who register together between October 15 and January 31 to submit roommate requests.

Otherwise, we do not honor rooming requests unless there's a medical issue presented via a note on letterhead from a licensed medical provider. We find requests encourage cliques and don't allow camp to meet each camper on an individual level: a level of educational quality we're serious about providing in our short time together. With so many groups of campers coming from the same schools or clubs - some of which having very different rowing situations than others -  the requests unintentionally disable the fun and growth of meeting new people and gaining new perspective. That said, there's plenty of time to hang out and experience camp with one's friends (the ones from before camp) during the day at camp.

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.