You've Already Met Next Summer's Staff

Every camp staffs from a different pool — returners, local students, the camper-to-counselor pipeline, the varsity roster, last year's staff and their group chats. But the rule is the same everywhere: the cheapest hire is the one you already know, and the window to keep them is right now, before this summer scatters. An August field guide.

At the overnight camp, it's the final banquet — sixty staff, one slideshow, everyone crying. At the day camp, it's pizza in the gym an hour after the last carpool pulls away. At the college soccer camp, it's a Friday afternoon: the last unclaimed water bottle finds its owner, and the players who ran every drill all week drift back toward summer training like the whole thing never happened.

Different endings, same scene. In every one of them, a director is watching next summer's staffing plan walk to the parking lot — and a certain number of the people walking, statistically more than you'd like, are already composing next spring's text message. The one that starts with "so sorry."

You won't find out who they are for seven months. Unless you ask now.

I ran day camps for a dozen summers, and I have received that text in March, in April, and once — memorably — during staff training week, from the parking lot. Every one of them was preventable in August. This column is the August.

Every camp staffs from a pool

Read our guide to the camp staffing pipeline and one number should follow you around: what a new hire actually costs. A placement fee, or weeks of your own recruiting. A background check. Training time spent teaching someone which lake is the swimming lake, which gym door actually unlocks, which cone drill goes second. Then the slow ramp — good by July, great by August, gone by Labor Day.

What varies — wildly — is where camps go to refill, and we mapped those channels in the staffing guide: overnight camps recruiting nationally and internationally, day camps hiring the college students and teachers who live ten minutes away, nonprofits growing their own through the camper-to-CIT-to-counselor pipeline, school camps staffing from the varsity roster and the alumni list, and college sports camps running on current players, visiting players home for the summer, and whoever last year's staff vouches for.

Five different pools. One shared failure mode: spending real money and real hours pursuing strangers while spending approximately zero scheduled minutes on the people who already know how everything works — the ones asleep a hundred yards from the office, or pulling into the lot at 7:45 with the good coffee, or stacking cones on your field right now.

Why the pool leaks

Usually not pay. Pay matters — a counselor doing mental math against a lifeguarding gig is doing real math — but pretending it's the whole story lets everyone off the hook.

The pool leaks because a twenty-year-old's summer is claimed by the loudest credible voice, and the voices get louder every year. The internship that "will look good." The parent gently asking when camp stops counting as a job. The quiet, wrong, but understandable suspicion that running a cabin or coaching forty seven-year-olds through a dribbling ladder is not a transferable skill. Your best staff member isn't leaving for money. They're leaving for a lanyard and a cubicle with air conditioning, because somebody convinced them that's what a future looks like.

Some leak is just growth stalling: same cabin, same group of eight-year-olds, same station at the same camp for the third year. A ladder no one can see might as well not exist.

And some leak is built into the model — and pretending otherwise wastes your energy. College players graduate. Varsity seniors leave for college. The scout who grew up in your program grows out of it. If your camp staffs from a roster, turnover isn't a retention failure; it's the calendar. Which changes the goal: you can't re-hire a graduate, but you can absolutely hire their teammate, their little brother, and their "trust me, she's great" recommendation. For roster-based camps, retention doesn't mean keeping the person. It means keeping the chain.

What the good ones do in August

They ask before everyone scatters. Fifteen minutes with every person you'd rehire — on a porch, at the picnic table by the drop-off loop, in the dugout — this week, popsicle optional. Not "are you coming back?", which produces a polite yes with the structural integrity of a friendship bracelet. Ask what they'd want the job to be next summer. What they'd change. What almost made them say no this year. Two days of these conversations beats any February phone campaign, and the people you ask will notice they were asked.

They make the offer while the summer is still warm. An offer in August says you specifically. An email in January says mail merge. Role, dates, pay, handshake — before they leave the property. You can hold a spot open all winter; you cannot hold enthusiasm open.

They work the chain on purpose. The best recruiter on your payroll is your current staff, and their fee is asking nicely. In August — not April — ask every good staff member for two names: who do you know who'd be great here? The college camp does this instinctively (the roster group chat is the most efficient applicant tracking system ever built); everyone else should steal it. A referral arrives pre-vouched, pre-warned about the hard parts, and statistically far more likely to be the kind of person your best people want to work beside — because your best people picked them. Put a small bounty on it if you like, but the ask matters more than the money.

They name the ladder out loud. Camper to CIT to counselor. Counselor to lead to the person who trains the leads. Station coach to site lead to assistant director. If someone has to guess whether there's a next rung, they'll assume there isn't and go find one at a company with an org chart. Two sentences — "next year I want you running the morning session, and here's what that pays" — outperform any bonus you can invent. Day camps and year-round nonprofits hold an extra card here: after-school hours, break camps, weekend clinics. Every one is a retention offer wearing a scheduling hat. A counselor with eight paid hours a week in October isn't a former employee you're courting — she's a current employee who never left.

They fight the résumé war directly. The internship is the real competitor, so compete. Write the recommendation in September, unprompted. Teach your people to describe the job in language the lanyard world respects: staff supervised, budgets managed, incidents de-escalated, programming designed for eighty stakeholders with strong opinions and no object permanence. For the athletes, sharper still: coaching experience — planning sessions, managing groups, teaching progressions — is a phrase with a long shelf life, whether the next stop is a coaching staff or a sales floor. None of it is spin. But a twenty-year-old won't know how to say it unless you say it first.

They do the bonus math. I have sat in the budget meeting where the returner bonus gets called extravagant. I have been the one calling it extravagant. I was wrong by approximately one agency invoice — a rounding error next to a placement fee, or one more week of being short-staffed in July. Structure it against next summer's signing, not this summer's ending — you're buying June, not thanking August.

They stay in touch like a person, not a newsletter. One genuine check-in in October — how's the semester, saw your team won, congrats on the internship you took instead of us, no hard feelings, mostly — does more than five "WE MISS YOU! 🏕️" emails in March. By March, everyone misses you. In October, you're the only one writing.

The ones who should go

Not everyone should come back, and the graceful goodbye is its own retention program. Every departing staff member becomes, permanently, either a recruiter or a cautionary tale — and nowhere does word travel faster than a locker room, a campus, or a town with one good coffee shop. The counselor you thank well, honestly, with a reference they can actually use, sends you their roommate next June. The one you guilt on the way out sends you nobody, and tells the story at parties for years. It's a good story. You're not the hero in it.

Where to start

This week. List everyone you'd rehire tomorrow. Fifteen minutes with each before the season ends — whether the ending arrives on departure day or one Friday carpool at a time. Offers to your key people now; two referral names from each of them; recommendations written by Labor Day. Then count the org chart holes that remain — and that number, not this summer's headcount, is your actual recruiting problem when staffing season opens in the fall.

The banquet speech, the pizza party toast, the last huddle at midfield — they're all right: this exact summer will never happen again. Next summer, though, is still negotiable. And the negotiation is this week.

You've Already Met Next Summer's Staff