A favorite evening and weekend summer camp activity (and certainly the most passionate) is Blue-White competition. Within the first week at Adirondack Camp, all campers are designated either ‘Blue’ or ‘White.’ This lifelong affiliation is retained from summer to summer and within families from generation-to-generation.
Campers on each team elect a boy and girl from each age division (junior, intermediate, and senior) to lead them as captains. The goal is to win the summer by accumulating the most individual event wins.
We don’t call our color games “color wars”. While we care passionately about winning, how we play and compete – through good sportsmanship and with integrity and fairness – is most important.
There are over fifty Blue-White events that take place over the course of the summer. Some of these correspond to camp activities; a majority are comprised of age-oriented plaques, like ‘Junior Basketball’ for example. These plaques are played on ‘triple’ nights, where each age group plays a different sport. A typical triple might consist of Junior Street Hockey, Intermediate Beach Volleyball, and Senior Water Polo.
Then there are all-Camp events like: Tug-of-War (brute strength against pulling strategies along 100 feet of rope), Capture-the-Flag (stealth, quick thinking and heart will guide how quickly you penetrate to the other side and steal away their flag), Dodge Ball (sheer ‘duck-now’ chaos, last one standing wins), Sing-Off (voice vs. power), Medley (something for everybody with a grand war canoe finale), Scavenger Hunt (Some items from previous years: the name of the capital of Azerbaijan, a four-leaf clover, biggest live spider, bowling shoes, a kazoo and didgeridoo, and the largest piece of plaid), Staff Hunt (all the staff don camouflage and take to the oddest corners of Camp in an attempt to avoid the keen eyes of 180+ campers).
