Building A Healthier Youth Sports Camps Model (phase One)

Abstract

Nearly 25% of elementary- and middle-school age children are severely overweight or obese. This is a national health problem that has received a great deal of recent attention, yet school-based programming has changed very minimally in response to this data. In fact, less than 10% of public schools in the US provide daily physical education or fitness programming for their students. Almost 40% of elementary- and middle-school children attend summer camps every year, and these camps provide a prime opportunity to provide the health and fitness programming that is missing from the schools. PURPOSE The purpose of the camps project is to develop an effective model for summer camp programming that will address problems of today's children, based on three goals: to decrease the prevalence of childhood obesity, to increase childhood activity levels, and to improve awareness and behaviors relative to nutrition. Phase one of the project involved determining baseline activity behaviors for all campers in each different sport camp (soccer, basketball, baseball, volleyball, softball, inline hockey, tennis, and multi-sport). METHODS Data were collected from campers who participated in one or more weekly sessions of the Youth Sport Day Camps. For each camper, activity level was assessed two times per week: campers wore pedometers for two 24-hour periods, and step counts were recorded for both camp day (7-hour) and full day (24-hour) increments. RESULTS Of the 2338 camper-weeks, 1225 (52.3%) of the campers provided useable data for nutrition and/or activity levels. Campers were evenly representative of both genders (52% males), and the average age was 10.3 years (range 5–14 years). Overall, campers took an average of 8,049 steps during the 7-hour camp day, and another 4,590 during the remainder of the day. We found several significant differences in activity levels between camps (i.e., baseball at 6962 steps per day; multi-sport at 8853 steps per day), but total daily activity levels remained constant between camps (range from 13,009 to 13,967 steps per day). CONCLUSIONS The data suggest that the campers participating in the Youth Sport Camps may be appropriately active (overall mean of 13,467 steps per day), but several interesting findings deserve mention. The data show that all camps were relatively equal on total daily activity levels, suggesting that campers who are more active during the day are less active at night. Results will be discussed relative to the differences between activities, decreased activity levels outside of camps, family and evening programming, and plans for future camp programming designed to address problem areas.