(Community Matters 183) Inside Sherman Lake YMCA Outdoor Center And How Camp Changes Kids

Your kid can do archery anywhere. The real question is whether they can look someone in the eye, handle a little boredom, and build friendships without a screen in their hand. Zach Klipsch, CEO of Sherman Lake YMCA Outdoor Center, talks to Community Matters to unpack why a tech-free camp environment can flip that switch in minutes and why the growth shows up long after the week ends.

A 365-acre outdoor campus in Augusta, Sherman Lake combines a traditional overnight summer camp with cabins, a day camp program, and a full health and wellness center on the same property. If you’re searching for a Michigan summer camp that builds confidence, or a youth development program that takes community seriously, this one’s for you.

Episode Resources

Sherman Lake YMCA Website

ABOUT COMMUNITY MATTERS
Former WBCK Morning Show host Richard Piet (2014-2017) returns to host Community Matters, an interview program focused on community leaders and newsmakers in and around Battle Creek. Community Matters is heard Saturdays, 8:00 AM Eastern on WBCK-FM (95.3) and anytime at battlecreekpodcast.com.

Community Matters is sponsored by Lakeview Ford Lincoln and produced by Livemic Communications.

Transcript

Welcome And How To Listen

Richard Piet 0:02

Good morning. This is Community Matters, the service of Lakeview Ford Lincoln. We come to you every Saturday at 95.3 FM in the eight o'clock hour or at Battle Creek Podcast.com. And you can look for us where you get podcasts. Just type Community Matters Calhoun County in the search bar. And then follow us, and you'll just get a nice little alert. It won't be uh, you know, like those very effective tornado alerts or something. You won't uh come across that loudly, but you'll get the alert that uh there is a new episode, so we invite you to do that. It must be close to spring and summer because it's time to talk about the Sherman Lake YMCA outdoor center and camp. Yeah. Uh think about that. That's a springtime warm weather kind of notion, isn't it? Zach Clips is here from Sherman Lake Outdoor Center to talk to us about all of that. Hello, Zach. Hi, Richard. How are you, sir? Good. Do you get uh some kind of higher clearance alerts about when spring is gonna stick or anything like that?

Zach Klipsch 1:08

I I wish I could use that. It'd be a great prediction device, but unfortunately, uh, so we actually run we run camp programs year-round. We don't just do the summer. Got it. And we just tell parents like we when your kids are out here, it's very much like it was 200 years ago. When it rains, they get wet, and when it's cold, they wear a coat. Like we find ways to still be outside. So um, you know, we try to keep the kids outside as much as possible. So yeah, when that weather changes, I wish I had a predictive model. Uh, unfortunately, I cannot figure that one out, but I'll let you know, you'll be my first call if I figure it out.

Richard Piet 1:38

Well, thank you. Yes, uh, and I can certainly appreciate that that uh, as one of my bosses would say, that's the spirit, right? No matter what the weather is, you're out there doing it and uh you prepare accordingly. Although many of us probably associate camp with summertime because school's out and all of that. Is that the most popular camp?

Zach Klipsch 2:00

So I would say it is it's our most intense or three months that we run summer camp. And an average day we'll have 200 to 250 kids just in our day camp program. Uh, in summer, we'll have any, or excuse me, an overnight camp, which is the kids who actually spend the night for a week, we'll have another 100 to 150. And so we have, and then we might have a school who might come out and do some summer enrichment with us, even then in summer. So any any given day, we might have 500 kids on site in the summer. So it's our most intense, but actually, our our program that we do with all of our local school districts, uh, we actually serve more kids in that program because it is nine months long. So we're serving kids in schools from from when school starts in September until basically lets out in late May, uh, we serve about 5,000 kids in that. So in summer, in those three months, we do about 3,000 kids. In the nine months of school, we do about 5,000. So it feels like summer is more intense because it's so many packed in at one period of time. But yeah, we're kind of serving kids year-round. It's it's why we're here is to be present for kiddos.

A YMCA Unlike Any Other

Richard Piet 3:01

All right. I want to get to that, but I suppose I'm getting ahead of us a little bit. The uh first of all, remind us about the Sherman Lake Y Outdoor Center. I mean, this is a tremendous jewel in not so far away area.

Zach Klipsch 3:15

It is. Obviously, as a CEO, I'm I'm slightly biased uh about that, but it's uh I I've been in the Y for just about 20 years now. It's the third YMCA I've worked with across the country. I'm from Iowa originally, so I've been in a Y in Iowa, one in Indiana, and one here in Michigan. Sherman Lake is is the only Y like it in the country. So it's it's the only Y that has a traditional overnight camp with cabins and a traditional health and wellness center on the same property. We have 365 acres, we're on a lake, we have horses, we have climbing walls, we have zip lines. I mean, I came here actually in 2009 for a meeting and I called my wife on the way home and I said, I think I just saw the coolest Y I've ever been to. And so that's kind of I kept an eye on it because it's such a neat Y. So it is it is a very neat Y. We do stuff a little bit differently. But if you haven't been out, I would encourage anybody in the community, you want to come see it. I I invite you to come out, we'll give you a tour. It's a really, really cool space to be.

Richard Piet 4:07

I was just about to say that must have made an impression, such that you wanted to try and work here. And and you did, you really did watch.

Zach Klipsch 4:14

I kept an eye on it. I reached out to the previous CEO and he became a mentor of mine. And then when when the position opened, my my wife and I, we have five kids and we uprooted and we came here because we just thought it was such a cool opportunity. And we've been here, like I said, almost 10 years. We just love it. And so it's a it's a really neat why. We have over 2,000 members who come and work out with us to try to get healthy. And then our school program, like I said, we serve about 5,000 students, our summer camps about 3,000. Uh, in total, we do about 20,000 people that we work with throughout the year. Through we do weddings, we do conferences, we do retreat groups. And so, yeah, we we really try to meet community where it is. We we see ourselves as a community center more than a camp. And so we really try to mirror what our community needs. And we feel like right now, maybe more than ever, our especially our young people need outdoors. Like they need recreation, they need independence, they need this ability to get bored. You know, that's that's one of the things that I've seen with my kids that it's interesting to watch, especially when you take technology away, which we are uh we're a tech-free camp when it comes to our kiddos that come here. It is a for the first five to 10 minutes, it's interesting to watch kids struggle because they they don't get bored. And when they're bored, they pull up a screen. But what's really neat is after about five to ten minutes, they break through it and then they start coming up with games and they start playing, you name it, tic-tac-toe, like all these different games that kids have been playing for centuries, like just these little games, they just start jumping right into it. But it's almost like you have to push through that uncomfortableness. But yeah, working with kids is just a really neat part of what we get to do, and then serving our community is our charge, is is really what we're we're set up to be. And so a lot of times people will think of us as a camp or they'll think of us as a gym. And those we see those as our tools, not as our mission. Our mission is to serve community, and we use those as tools to do that work. Uh, so it's a neat job to be able to do, and we have a great team really driven to to help people, which especially I think in these chaotic times of what just feels like you're not sure who's what, where, and all this kind of stuff, to be able to have a place where you're just welcome no matter what. We don't dig into all the other stuff. It doesn't matter if you're red or you're blue or you're short or you're tall. We are just here to to try to serve our community. And so it's it's a neat place to be for sure. Yeah, and it feels like we're making a difference, which is which is what you want to be as a part of a nonprofit.

Richard Piet 6:30

I want to understand that a little more. It uh responds to the needs of the community more like a community center, as you said. And you also said that it's different than any other Y you'd been to. Is that the center of it? Somehow we managed to formulate this community part here that's different, or is that part of the mission and it's just kind of clicked here?

Serving Community In A Crisis

Zach Klipsch 6:52

Yeah, so I think all Ys try to serve their community. You know, most YMCAs are traditionally more like urban-based. So take like the Kalamazoy or the Battle Creek Y, they're kind of in city center. You know, we're different because we're out outside of that. But we do have our own community out here. You know, we serve generally people who come to us, especially in our health and wellness or membership centers, they they'll drive 10 minutes to us, that kind of a thing. But but no, I think all Y's at their heart should act as community centers. I think a lot do. And I'll I'll give you an example. When the pandemic came through, our business model is to bring grip big groups of people together. You think about camp is a big group, retreats are big groups, memberships are big groups. Well, you can't do that during a pandemic. And so some whys across the country, they close their doors and said, Hey, we can't do anything. Our team sat down and said, Hey, our community needs us now more than ever. If we shut their doors and we're not a community center, then we're just a camp and a gym. And so we completely shifted. And so we did uh we work with local food banks and with actually the Kalamazoo Y to make food for kids in Kalamazoo at the time who weren't getting food because school was closed. And so many of those kids got their meals at school. So from April 1st of 2020 till December 31st, we actually served 100,000 meals that were delivered free to kids in the community. We ran a virtual school. So, like imagine obviously those parents who went to school and went virtual. Well, if you have a kindergartner, but you have to work full-time, how does that work? And so we talked to the different superintendents in school districts and said, hey, we'll run the virtual school because you're not going to be able to, you're not. And so we actually had at one point in time 80 kids being dropped off to our location. We have all these gymnasiums, so we're able to spread them out apart from each other. When they were in class, they were representing four school districts. So we had kids from Lakeview, we had kids from Gillsburg, Gusta, Richland, and KP at Kalamazoo Public. So they're all in different grades and different school districts on different schedules. But we hired a staff team to basically those who were going to work inside with kids during their scheduled school time, if you will. And then when they had breaks, we had staff that would take them outside and do fun games with them outside. And that way, parents, you know, we have nurses who are parents who are like, well, how am I supposed to be a nurse and be a parent of a kindergartner? So then we were able to kind of step in and support. So that was something that we've never done before, but that's what our community needed. So we tried to evolve to match that. So we're constantly looking at what our community needs and how we can potentially evolve to match our community needs. So I think that's our wise. It's at the core of us, but I think it's at the core of a lot of YMCs across our country.

Richard Piet 9:16

Yeah, that is a tremendous example and one that perhaps school districts couldn't just pivot and do that without having had the extra bandwidth to figure it out on a dime, no less. Uh and so there was uh a tremendous opportunity there for you. And congratulations on having done that.

Tech-Free Camp And Real Independence

Zach Klipsch 9:37

Yeah, I mean, it was it was a need, right? I mean, I just I yeah, I had little kids that it wasn't during that time, my kids are older now, but I had little kids and I remember that like trying to figure out how do we get them to especially just one snow day. Like I remember a snow day thinking, all right, my wife has to work and I have to work, who's gonna watch all these kids? How do we do this? Yeah, and that was one day. Like we were talking months. So yeah, it was a tricky time, but I I just think that's our our our local nonprofits, our local community groups, that's when we're we're charged to step up the most, is when we're in those times. And I was really proud of what our team did to step up to do some of that really cool work.

Richard Piet 10:11

Well, I was encouraged to hear you say that uh after the young people arrive and then have to be separated from their technology, that it only takes five minutes or so for them to break out of that. That's encouraging.

Summer Prep And Global Staff

Zach Klipsch 10:24

It's it's I mean, kids are resilient. You know, I I sometimes I think they get a little bit of a bad rap and being tough or being challenging and it's different today. But I also think about kids today are dealing with much different things than they were before. And it's kind of funny, you know, in our summer camp, we kind of joke that the the number one rule breaker of our technology is not our children, actually. It is parents who want to make sure they can contact their kid all the time, which I understand again as a parent. But there is there's a bit of this like tethering when that happens where a kid doesn't feel like they're ever totally independent. And so that's that's one of the things we try to encourage parents is just understand that I totally get you want to be able to contact your child at any point in time. And if you call at any time, we will do our best to get you in communication, even if that means we have to try to pull a kid off a sailboat, which be prepared. When we pull a kid off a sailboat to talk to you, they're not going to be happy. You know, I think about so much of, you know, when kids get on a bus, they all face the same direction. When kids get in a classroom, they all face the same direction. When kids go to band, they face the same direction, but they're never looking at each other. They're always away. And so we see a lot of kids struggling with eye contact. We see a lot of kids struggling with being able just to carry on a conversation like you and I are right now, because most of the time their conversations are with their phones. And so we know we need to teach, you know, these things. We can't just say, like, oh, this is just a human skill you should have. No, communication is learned. And so we really got to try to teach what this looks like. And doing it away from phones is just much easier. But yeah, we get that part is really, really neat. The independence that we see from kids, you know, again, I use my kids as a great example. Like, I saw my youngest go to camp. And at one point in time, one of the staff is like, Hey, did your son forget a swimsuit? And I was like, I mean, my son is 12, he's old enough to plan it. We gave him a list and he needs to look to learn what those consequences are of not being prepared. And if he'd like to reach out, we can have a conversation about it. And but we we want the kids sometimes, I think as parents, we want to bubble wrap our kids, which I understand, but also sometimes it's okay that they trip. You know, we'd rather them trip while running than crash going 100 miles an hour. And so we need to let them trip a few times to understand the consequences of a trip. And so, but it's tough, right? I mean, that's that navigation of keeping kids safe, but also allowing them a little bit of risk so that they can kind of venture out. And so, but it's really neat work. The the growth that we see, you know, there's been some studies done from the American Camp Association, which is a national nonprofit over overseeing kind of how camps are operated and making sure they're doing their best to keep kids safe. They've actually done studies that show a week of a really intentional overnight camp socially is equal to nine months of school. Oh my. Because they they really are in a cabin of kids who are different. They have a counselor who's closer in age. It's not prescribed like, oh, we're at math right now, do this. The kid has more choice. And so they there's so much really neat growth that happens. The hard part is it's not like we can give a report card to a parent at the end of the week and say, oh, here's how your kid's now a better human being. It is no, ask them about new friends that they made, ask them about challenges they face, ask them about grit and did they develop any grit while they're at camp. Like these are the things that camp is all about and what we teach. It's just hard because so many times you're looking for a trophy or participation medal of some kind of grade. And sometimes kids don't need to be graded, they just need to kind of breathe and have some fun. And so that's that's really what we're all about is making sure kids have chances to grow socially, emotionally, character-wise. That's all important to what we do.

Richard Piet 13:52

So, what's the plan right now? It's it's springtime, you're thinking about the warm weather months in camp. What are you readying for? And what will these young people do when they're there?

Zach Klipsch 14:04

You know, I heard a camp professional years ago say, you know, as camp people, we get asked, so what do you do for nine months? And uh he has this great comment. He said, Have you ever thrown a children's sleepover for like your children's friends for I don't know, like 3,000? It takes some prep. It takes a little prep. And so that's one thing we're doing, it's just prepping. You know, we have to hire 110 staff. So you figure we have to do that process. We actually hire international staff as well. So we bring in about 20 staff from across the world. And the reason is is we we understand a lot of the kiddos that we serve in our community aren't gonna have the opportunity to visit Romania or visit Australia or visit Mongolia. But last year we had staff from all those countries. And so as a child and as a parent, you can think my kid is gonna come and have a global experience. It's not just this little thing in you know, Augusta, Michigan. This they're gonna learn from people all over the world. So that that part, we're hiring that, making sure that whole process comes through correctly, you know, building the full, you know, curriculum. And we've been doing this now for over 30 years at our location here. So a lot of what we do is kind of adjust and add on to. Every once in a while, we try to let's just scrap it and restart and just see if we end up on the same thing because we don't like to just repeat and repeat. Making sure we're doing all that, making sure we we do tour days for parents. And so, you know, we know a lot of times there's anxiety about camp from both sides, the child and the parent. And if we only address the one up one of them, we're gonna miss the other side, which is about 50-50. And so we do tour days so that parents understand what it looks like out here and they can ask us questions. Um, we're getting all of our meals, you know, in the summer. Like I said, we serve about 3,000 kids in the summer from a meal standpoint. You know, we're probably doing 15,000 meals just in the summer. And so getting all that prepped, the number of, you know, you think about it, the number of food sensitivities and dietary restrictions and allergies, we're serving that many people. And so we have we're really intentional to make sure everybody's safe. It's our number one priority. So we got to make sure we have all that stuff in place. We have a full health services team. And so if anything were to happen out here, we have people on staff who can take care of it. We are professionals in this youth development work. You know, sometimes I think camp folks are, I say this half jokingly, but those hippies in the woods. And I say it half jokingly because we are kind of a little bit that way. But I've dedicated 20 years of my career to this work. This is this is what I chose to do. I wanted to be a teacher, actually, but I didn't want to do it in a box in a room. I love the outsides more, and so that's why I got into camping. And that's most of our staff are people who grew up wanting to work with young people, but didn't like this like boxed in system. And that's what we do now is we work with kids in a very different kind of setup.

Activities As Bait For Belonging

Richard Piet 16:42

That makes a tremendous amount of sense. And uh, you have illuminated the part about some of the intricacies of making this happen. So that's a more of an appreciation opportunity for us. What about the students, the young people? What are they gonna do when they're there?

Inclusion And Camp Scholarships

Zach Klipsch 17:01

Absolutely. That's a great question. So, you know, I kind of what we do at camp, there's some bait that we put out there, and then there's the hook. And so let me talk about the bait first. So the bait is if you name a camp activity, just about any one of them that is available to the kids that come to camp. So we have horseback riding, we have uh high ropes, we have zip lines, we have a lake, obviously. So we do sailing, we do paddleboarding, we do canoeing, we do archery. I mean, just about anything that you can think of, we do it. But that really is all bait for us. Because if you think about it, you know, if if we tried to compete with, let's say, Disney, when it comes to fun and exciting, we just can't keep up every year, they're throwing millions on millions on millions. So we can't keep up with that. But what we can do that I think we do better than just about everybody else, is relationship building. And so when a kid comes to camp, they come for the activities, but over that time period, they build relationships with kids in their cabin and they build relationships with our staff. And that is truly, if you ask somebody who went to camp years ago, that and they say camp really made a difference in their life, it wasn't archery. I'm gonna be real. Like, archery is fun. We've seen an explosion in the participation in archery, especially in our young women after the Hunger Games came out and Katniss really kind of showed us the way. But generally, like no one's saying when they're 40, like, you know what changed my life? Archery. Like that's not that's not what we do. But archery is this really cool thing that most kids don't get to do. So we kind of use it as the bait. But when they get out here, they really build these relationships. But kids, like I said, you come out here in the summer, you're gonna see a kid sailing across a catamaran across Sherman Lake, you're gonna see a kid going off a zipline. And one of the things that's really cool also is our camp programs are designed to be very, very inclusive so that anybody, any child in our community can participate. We work with a lot of kids with a lot of different special needs and differing needs just to make sure we're trying to be as inclusive. And I'll use our zip lines as an example. We built our zip line to be accessible, and so we can actually we have a system set up that we could actually put a camper who's in a wheelchair into a harness. We can pull them to the top, clip them onto the zip, zip them off, and then lower them back down back into their chair. So we try to make sure that every kid has access. And and that's more of a physical access. The other thing that's really special, I think, in the camp experience is we do scholarships. So, you know, a lot of private camps are well, if you can afford this, you can come. If you can't afford, you can't come. Well, for us, that's not serving our community if we're only here for those who have wealth. And so this past year, um, and in 2025, we did $180,000 in scholarship assistance. And so we anybody who calls in and says, Hey, I need help, we work with them. We find some way to work with them because we feel like one of the most special things about camp is when you go into a cabin with 10 kids and two staff, one of the kids may have come from a family with generational wealth. They gave us their credit card and didn't blink an eye and didn't even think about it. Then we have another family who might come from a single parent at home working two jobs with a couple kids, barely getting by. And we make sure that they can come as well. And you put those two kids on a bunk bed, and over a week, it changes both of their lives. Because the the child who comes from generational wealth says, Oh, not every kid was raised this, like you don't have a big screen and an Xbox in your room. And then this other kid is just like, oh, so you don't take the bus everywhere that you go? Like, how do you get there? And so both of their worlds expand because they just haven't had that chance. You know, you if you go to school, there's these social hierarchies of like, well, these kids hang out with these kids and these kids hang out with these kids, but at camp that all blows up because they get to come here and be able to be together and break those molds. And so one of one of the big things, and as a nonprofit CEO, it's my responsibility to go out and tell a story about how we raise money to make sure that's possible because we want to make sure every kid has the chance. And so, any of your listeners who who have a passion for getting kids outdoors, please reach out and I'll kind of we can have a conversation of of how you can help make that possible. Because I think that of above all else is what we do special is we and we do that in our membership facility as well. You might have somebody, two people on a treadmill who have never met from totally different worlds, and next thing you know, you start talking to the guy next to you, and that'll you build a friendship and a relationship. And so, in a in a very divisive world right now, I feel like the work that we do bringing groups of people from different backgrounds might be one of the best things that we do in our communities is having these people build relationships with others who are a little different than they are.

Richard Piet 21:17

Yes, and thank goodness you are, because uh these are the things that uh make a difference in someone's outlook, maybe from day to day, even to say nothing of the experiences that their loved ones might be having in these uh in these opportunities. So when do we have to say yes, I want to go? And then I would imagine at some point you have to cut off the reservations, right?

Registration Timing And How To Reach Us

Zach Klipsch 21:44

So uh we actually believe it or not, we opened camp registrations in September of the previous year. Yeah. So we actually hand out generally schedules to parents this summer for next summer so they know what's coming. And we also know I'm gonna I'm gonna be totally transparent. parent like I have five kids, camp's expensive. It is like it is you figure an overnight camp is six days, 24 hour care, 16 meals, all inclusive activities, a staff who is trained, who is certified, who has background checked, who has gone youth protection training. It's expensive, but it is also you, you know, I do believe you get what you pay for. And but if if camp is too expensive for you, please call us because we want to make it available to everybody. But we just we want to make it available. You just got to let us know you need some support. And so you can register for camp today, but just know we we are already filling up weeks and wait listing weeks. So I would tell any parent who's who's thinking about it, get going because to get a spot you got to kind of get early as the as we get closer and closer to summer, more and more weeks will fill. But if we have a spot available and a parent calls us the week before and is like, hey, is there any chance? We'll do whatever we can to get a kid to camp. So there is no like you can't register after this date but just know it gets the later you wait, the harder and harder it is to get a spot for the week that you are all right.

Richard Piet 23:03

So uh don't put it off ask about it. And and I want to restate what you just said. If you think it's too expensive, call and ask about it because uh there could be opportunities anyway and that may not be a boundary to yeah that is uh really encouraging to hear. So what's the number they should call Zach?

Zach Klipsch 23:24

They can obviously get us on our website most parents like to kind of preview the web first. So you can just go to ShermanlakeYMCA.org. You can check out stuff there. There's some visual tours we know parents like to see what the cabins would look like what activities look like you can call us directly at 269-7313000. You can check us out on on Instagram, you know check out any of our socials. But yeah if you have any questions please feel free to reach you can email you can call whatever the best way to communicate is for you. And as parents, again, we are parents my executive director of camp is a parent my summer camp director is a parent we know what we're doing when it comes to camp and I don't mean like we know how to run a camp we know that but we know we are taking care of someone's most cherished and valuable thing that they have like we we don't take it lightly what we do. We are this is where we're not just those hippies in the woods. We are youth development professionals who are trying to raise up our future leaders and so we take it very seriously safety is number one. So if you have any questions about safety, how do we hire our staff, how do we background check them, any of that, please call us we'd be happy to have that conversation and help learn more and and if you have other ways that you that folks in the community think that you can help us do this work better, please let us know. We're always trying to improve we know our community constantly changes which means we have to constantly change. So whatever we can do to get better we're we're always here for it.

Richard Piet 24:40

And we'll put a link in the show notes for this episode if you're driving or something and uh didn't have a chance to write that down you can click through and see the website for Sherman Lake YMCA Outdoor Center and get the information on camps and all of that or uh the number 7313000 of course 39th Street North 39th and Augusta. So it's not that far away but yet it can be a world away from uh what what the normal routine might be all year long. So a great opportunity at Sherman Lake.

Zach Klipsch 25:11

Zach we'll stay in touch and and perhaps uh you'll be back with updates uh sooner or later yeah I would love to and I appreciate what you do to uh to support our community too right the stuff that you're doing getting people to talk getting to learn about what's happening in the community is is an imperative part of being part of community so I thank you for what you're doing as well.

Richard Piet 25:28

Well thank you as well Zach Clips CEO of Sherman Lake Outdoor Center yep the big camp still there on North 39th in Augusta check it out and uh we'll be back shortly on community matters