Today, I went to Camp Carnegie at the Leeds Beckett Campus in Headingley. I hadn’t been before and being a sporty person I was really looking forward to trying the activities on offer. There were a lot of other kids there, most of them were between 7 and 11 years old.
I arrived early and was given the option of doing table tennis, badminton or foot tennis until everyone had arrived at 10am. At 10am we had to make our final decision as to what sports we wanted to do for the morning session – you could choose between American Football, Racket Sports or Athletics and I chose Athletics. We were taken outside to the huge running track and as a warm up we played “capture the flag” with cones – it was fun and got us all moving. After that we split up into different groups – the coaches did this by organising us into height order – I think they were trying to make it fairer but for me it was a bit annoying as I’m only small and I ended up with younger kids rather than my own age group. However, my group started with running and it was a very good session.
We did long sprints and learned about how to get around the bend in the track quickly – I love running (I have just started the parkrun) and was interested in the advice given. Mid-morning we had a break for 20 minutes to rest and have a snack and a drink from our lunch-bags. After the break we moved from track to field and had some training on throwing the javelin – we then had a competition to see who could throw the furthest. I really enjoyed that – some camps I’ve been to before are just about learning skills – this one allowed me to actually compete which was great!
All the groups came together for lunchtime and we ate our packed lunches indoors in the reception area, it meant we could socialise with children who weren’t in our groups and I saw some friends from school and from my rugby team who’d been doing other activities. When everyone had finished we were allowed free time to play some of the sports that were available inside like table tennis and that was a fun thing to do rather than just sitting around.
I chose to do football as my afternoon activity. We practiced dribbling, cross bar challenge and penalty shoot outs with our coach – who was called Josh. There were a lot of coaches there and they were all friendly and fun to be around. We then played some games of football outside but the thunder and lightning brought everyone back in very quickly! We still managed to play football on an indoor court though.
At the end of the day we waited for our parents to come at 4pm – I want to go again – I’ve asked mum to book me in!
Joe Roberts, aged 11
Leeds Beckett University’s Camp Carnegie summer holiday sports camps run until 30th August, for more details click here.
Disclosure: Mumbler received a free day camp to provide a review, however our views are always open and honest.
