Running a sports camp at local colleges is a great marketing tool, because students who spend time at a sports camp at a college may ultimately choose to attend that college after high school.
”Summer youth camps help to expose the facility and the opportunities that are available at Elmhurst College,” said John Quigley, associate director of communications. ”We have an outstanding facility and it gives us an opportunity to showcase it.”
In fact, Wheaton College has recently expanded its number of camps as a way of getting more people to see their campus. Carolann Paul, director of conference services, calls this strategy developing ”admissions potential.”
But do these camps make money for the colleges?
”You bet,” said Paul. ”Every college and university is different on how they operate their programs. Some operate them as break even; Wheaton runs them on a for-profit basis.”
Wheaton has always run lots of adult continuing-education programs and denominational meetings, she said, but has just begun expanding its summer sports camp programs because the college found it could make use of more of its facility because sports camps use different parts of the campus than adult programs do.
”We have only just gotten into the youth camp area, but the youth camp structure is the largest we`ve had. It`s exploding in popularity,” she said. In fact, Wheaton ends up totally housing about 5,000 people for all its programs during the summer.
”We gross about three quarters of a million dollars, and about 45 percent of that is net and goes back to the college,” Paul said.
Only one of the sports camps at Wheaton, the Crusader Basketball Camp, is actually sponsored by the school. The others are sponsored by outside organizations or entrepreneurial companies.
And even though the recession has caused a slight dip in enrollment at their camps, said Paul, the steady demand for them in the last few years has meant that the college has had more requests for space to run camps than they can accommodate.
”If I took all the calls I got, I`d have at least twice or three times the business,” said Paul.
