Our Story
Forty children, two coaches and a borrowed pitch in 2013. The ratios have not moved since, which is most of what there is to say.
It started because of one boy who hated football.
I coached a school side for nine years and every season there was a child who had been signed up for football by somebody else and was quietly miserable about it. One of them turned out to be a swimmer. Nobody had ever put him in a pool.
That is the entire idea behind this camp, and it has not been improved on since 2013. Give a child five sports in a fortnight instead of one, keep the ratios honest, and get out of the way while they work out which one is theirs. Everything else here — the cabins, the pool, the bursary, the coaches — is in service of that.
Kwabena Owusu
Founder and camp director
The story so far
Thirteen years, seven decisions.
2013
Forty children and a borrowed pitch
Two coaches, one week, and a field above the Volta lent to us by a school that had no use for it in August. Everybody slept in tents. It rained for three days and nobody went home.
2016
The site at Akosombo
We stopped borrowing and took a long lease on the land past Atimpoku. Six cabins went up that spring, and the jollof mutiny settled Sunday lunch for good.
2018
The pool, and two lifeguards on it
The single biggest thing we have ever built, and the reason swimming stopped being an outing to the river. The rule that the pool never opens without two qualified guards dates from the week it filled.
2019
Varsity Camp
Our first campers had grown out of the programme, so we built one for them: advanced clinics, mentor workshops and the specialty tracks. Eleven of that first cohort have since coached here.
2021
The bursary fund
Set up with the trustees after two seasons of turning away families we should not have turned away. Twelve part-funded places a year, assessed independently of the camp office.
2023
Day Camp, for the towns nearby
Akosombo, Atimpoku and Juapong. The same coaching and the same five sports, eight in the morning until five, for families who live close enough not to need a bed.
2026
Six hundred campers a summer
Three residential camps, a day camp, thirty-four staff and a waiting list for July. The ratios have not moved since the tents.
