Camp Wahoo returns to its roots

By Bart Isley

Published: June 15, 2008

Kids playing stickball, fishing and making up games to play until it’s too dark to see sounds a lot like the 1950s.
At Camp Wahoo, that’s exactly the point.
“Every night last year we had all the things you could do at camp and the whole camp was over there playing stick ball,” said camp co-director Tony Zentgraf. “They took their shirts off and threw them on the ground, took their shoes off and played out here until they couldn’t see anymore. That was the epitome of what we’re trying to create.”
The sports camp is held at the Miller School and is set for the second summer of its newest incarnation. The camp’s approach is to get kids to play and learn about a variety of sports. Students are taught some basic skills in sports like lacrosse and basketball in the morning by a variety of high-level coaches, like Zentgraf, who played baseball for Virginia and in the Orioles organization.
Then at night, the campers are turned loose with those skills to simply play.
That methodology has placed Camp Wahoo firmly on the front lines of the war on specialization, a trend that has come to dominate youth sports.
“Now everybody is carted off to some practice where they’re competing and trying to get this thing, whatever that may be,” said camp co-director and Miller school varsity basketball coach Fred Wawner. “Our goal for these kids is to have eight of them sitting around and create a game.”
That happens in the evening session. That’s when something that sounds a lot like Calvinball, a game that combined all sports and sports equipment, and was filled with made-up rules, played by Calvin and Hobbes the title characters in a comic strip by Bill Watterson.
“We’re giving them structure, then we create games that are wacky but incorporate the same skills,” Zentgraf said. “Then we say, you guys figure out another game. At about the third day they’re doing weird stuff, like playing games off of rain gutters.”
There aren’t any typical trophies or medals to be had at the end of a session. Awards are scrawled on drinking cups. Then again, how could anyone hand out medals for things like “who played baseball with lacrosse sticks best?”
Campers will play outside too, because there won’t be much to do inside. Cell phones, Ipods, video games and anything else along those lines aren’t allowed at the camp. That comes from another of Camp Wahoo’s core tenets.
“If we don’t get [children] engaged in something then we’ve got the problem we have in the country now of obesity and lethargy,” Zentgraf said. “We shouldn’t be spectators, we should be participants.”
The camp also significantly reduces the adult control that’s found in every level of youth sports today allowing the campers to improvise and work together to develop and play the games.
“You never had an adult around,” said camp leader Kathy Zentgraf, a former camper who’s father and former Virginia athletic director Gene Corrigan ran the camp. “The last thing you wanted to do was to go tell on somebody and get an adult involved who’d then come out and ruin the game by imposing some limitations or rules.”
For Zentgraf and everyone else involved, Camp Wahoo is very much a family affair. Corrigan, Zentgraf’s father and Wawner’s grandfather, founded the camp along with three other collegiate coaches from around the area (Billy McCann, Weenie Miller and Jack Null).
The all sports camp structure lasted from 1957-1967, but the basketball camp born out of the original idea persisted much longer. During the basketball camp’s heyday, counselors and campers included such luminaries as Jerry West, Larry Brown, Debbie Ryan and Pete Maravich.
Wawner, the Zentgrafs and Brian Corrigan, Gene’s son, all came together to bring back Camp Wahoo last year while returning it to its all-sports format. They also got everyone else in the family involved.
The Zentgrafs’ daughters, Lena and Maggie will both serve as counselors during this summer’s sessions. Lena played her college soccer at Notre Dame and Maggie followed in her footsteps there as a current player. Both will serve as counselors this summer, and at least one is already excited about the sessions.
“What I love about this camp is that all the counselors play — everyone plays,” Maggie said. “All the camps I went to in high school were a bunch of older girls hanging around with their sunglasses on, not talking to anyone and not participating in anyting.”
The family history of involvement in the camp spurs on Wawner, Corrigan and the Zentgrafs, and it’s clear that this updated version of Camp Wahoo is gaining a great deal of momentum. The staff has added a second session this year, and should serve twice as many campers.
“It’s going to grow and knowing the history and foundation of it energized us,” Wawner said. “Those stories get passed down and going through it last year for the first time, by like the second hour, it was like, this is it, this is Camp Wahoo.”