Soar Like an Eagle

This Camporee was kind of weak on an overall theme, but had enough fun events to where the kids didn't care.

I tried a couple new things on this one as well. I did a Webelos Midway in which Troops would 'advertise' themselves. In places were there is not a Troop every 10 blocks this may seem kind of silly, but just in Minneapolis there are around 35 Troops. In a 3 mile radius there might be 4 or 5 Troops. We wanted to make sure that 2nd year Webelos were aware that if they belonged to Pack 999 that they did not necessarily have to join Troop 999, even though they may both be chartered out of the same organization. We wanted to build a little competition amongst Troops to force them to step up their programs a little bit to attract new Scouts. We gave each Troop a picnic table and Webelos and their parents could walk through and talk to the SPL and Scoutmaster from each Troop about their program. Overall it was a success.

I also tried a food drive. We had 2 kegs of root beer and boys who donated 2 cans of food recieved a glass of root beer. We collected 13 grocery bags of food which came out to around 650 pounds of food. Not as much as a Scouting for Food drive but in September the food shelf was very happy to recieve it.

Event Form

Budget

What went good:

Iwo Jima Event: This was the hit of the day. We had a sledding hill that the boys would assemble the flag pole on the pole at the bottom and then carry it up the hill where they would raise their Patrol flag. We had a couple Marines on hand to help judge the event which the kids thought was cool.

What didn't go so good:

Human Bowline: One of the Patrols thought of a way to tie the knot without the kids all going through the hole, they did it in about 10 seconds compared to the 5 minutes of the other Patrols. I had not thought to specifically prohibit this and I went round and round with the ASM from that Troop who didn't like his Patrol being disqualified. Since then I have tried to come up with rules against all of the cheesy outs like that.

Matchless fire starting: Same basic thing as above. I ended up canceling the event the Friday of the Camporee and putting it off till the next Camporee where I was MUCH more explicit on the rules.

Time measure event: I recieved almost universally bad reviews on this one. Won't do it again.

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