Santa Cruz Soccer creates a new kind of soccer camp for kids of all ages

Santa Cruz Soccer in action

Every summer at Delaveaga Park in Santa Cruz, a little bit of magic is created out on a field full of brightly colored t-shirts. It's Santa Cruz Soccer, and it's a lot more than a summer camp where kids learn to play.

"Probably the best way for me to put it is we want to bring out a feeling of harmony and joy," says Bill Trimpi, who owns the business along with Mike Herzog. "We want to create a community atmosphere -- that's something that kids innately want."

The summer is broken into individual weeks, with each week a self-contained camp comprised of newcomers, returning campers, and old-timers. The camp is set up with the emotional health of the group at its core: the youngest kids are taught soccer in a safe, playful atmosphere, and as the campers mature, they are slowly integrated into the camp's leadership roles where they can mentor new kids coming in.

"Ninety percent or more of the coaches have been campers," Trimpi explains. "They know the philosophy of our camp -- learning to enjoy -- and they have that sense in their bones. We make sure they have that nurturing, compassionate kind of energy."

Owner Mike Herzog developed the part of the camp dubbed the Leadership Development Program, which teaches coaching techniques, as well as life lessons, to kids thirteen to fifteen years old. The kids start as mature campers and learn to be leaders for the younger children.

One former teenage coach, Katy Scowcroft, is now a camp director who helps Trimpi and Herzog run the camp and train the coaches. Like many of the Leadership graduates, she started as a camper, and she credits the camp with helping her to find her vocation.

"I've really found my place here," says Scowcroft. "I've always enjoyed working with kids, but it was soccer camp that showed me what I was going to do."

She was an assistant coach throughout high school, and then surprised her parents when she wanted to come back for summers and after college... to keep coaching soccer. "Bill and Mike became my mentors really quickly and taught me different approaches to distracting kids who are injured or refocusing kids who have different types of processing disabilities or are having a hard time in the group," she says. She has channeled those skills into working with special needs kids in the public schools.

The approach that Bill and Mike developed and that Katy applies to her job with Santa Cruz Soccer and in the schools is called Learning Through Enjoyment. Scowcroft explains, "the way we teach soccer specifically presents concepts through games. Kids have the natural inclination and learning style through play. If you teach them through play, they're more open to learn."

"We have many different themes that we've created over the years, like the Boardwalk game," Trimpi says. "They go play on the rides like the Giant Dipper."

Unlike other soccer camps, where they learn drills and then scrimmage, Santa Cruz Soccer campers learn a variety of games that help them function better as a community, while also learning soccer.

Scowcroft says that she has applied what she's learned about Learning Through Enjoyment to her public school classes. In one class where she had to teach remedial language arts skills, she made up creative writing exercises. On one day, she says, "We wrote a proper paragraph on a subject, and identified the parts of speech. Then we'd take out the nouns or adverbs and we had an entire class of Mad Libs. A couple of kids told me that they went home and did them for their parents."

The fact that the kids enjoyed the exercise so much that they showed it at home indicated that they had learned something deeper than identifying parts of speech.

Parents of longtime campers who have graduated from the Leadership Development Program have nothing but praise for Santa Cruz's long-running soccer camp.

"This is a grass roots service to our community that gives many kids more self esteem and brings fun in the out of doors to keep them developing strong and healthy bodies," explains Jennifer Moon, whose son started as a five-year-old camper and went through the program until he became an assistant coach. "The campers also learn to have compassion for younger athletes and to work towards their personal best."

"I'm rewarded every day by the joy that kids have at camp," says Katy Scowcroft. "I've never worked at a place where kids are so happy."