Don’t Forget to Play the Game

Scouters often complain about youth sports. They say that sports are all consuming, that coaches only care about building character when they’re winning, and that sports just teach kids to win at games while Scouting teaches kids to win at life.

Be that as it may, there’s one thing coaches do better than Scouting. They remember to play the game.

What do I mean by that? After months of conditioning and drills and watching film and a host of other tasks, athletes eventually don their uniforms and head for the football field, the basketball court, or the baseball diamond. They never forget that all the preparation they’ve done is just that: preparation.

In Scouting, however, we sometimes confuse the preparation for the game itself. Consider pioneering, for example. Many troops spend so much time teaching the basics—how to tie knots and lashings—that they never get around to the main event—building a signal tower or a monkey bridge or a merry-go-round. The same thing happens with orienteering; we produce kids who know how to use a map and compass but who have never used them in a real orienteering competition. (Take a look at this video and think about how it compares with the orienteering your troop does.)

I encourage you to take a hard look at your troop program and make sure your Scouts are playing the game, not just getting ready. Nobody wins trophies just for practicing.

Secrets of Philmont, Part 2

In my last post, I talked about the importance of tradition to the Philmont experience–and how you can add tradition in your troop. Philmont does something else that I think is equally important. It takes backpacking to another level by mixing in program activities at backcountry camps. Depending on your itinerary, you might shoot black-powder rifles, meet some mountain men, enjoy a chuck-wagon dinner, pan for gold, and/or experience geocaching. In fact, program activities are available every couple of days, depending on how motivated a crew is.

Your troop obviously can’t set up an extensive network of backcountry camps for your next backpacking trip, but there are other ways that you can add a little extra measure of fun to outings. Here are some ideas to enliven a simple hike:

• Hike to a destination: a gorgeous waterfall, a historic site, or a mountain stream where you can soak your tired feet.
• Turn the hike into a geocaching treasure hunt. Plant caches along the way with clues that guide Scouts to subsequent caches.
• On a hike in the heat of summer, figure out a way that some parents can meet you at the midpoint with homemade ice cream.
• Have two patrols start hiking from opposite ends of a trail and meet in the middle. The last to arrives fixes lunch.
• Play the alphabet game. Challenge the Scouts to identify natural features starting with the letters of the alphabet in order (ant, bark, cirrus clouds, etc.)

You can do similar things with other types of activities. When you do a familiar activity in an unfamiliar place or when you add just a little twist to a routine activity, you make the activity more memorable–and heighten interest in what comes next.

Smartphones in Scouting: A curse or a cure?

Great thoughts on the use of smartphones in Scouting, which I support. Of course, many Scouters disagree, some with valid reasons. (My successor as Scoutmaster was quite surprised at summer camp the day a mom showed up to pick up her homesick son, who’d brought a contraband phone to camp.) Whether you agree or disagree with allowing smartphones in your troop, remember one thing: It’s not your troop. 🙂 The patrol leaders’ council, with your guidance, should set policies like this. Too often, we say we support the youth leadership method but then make decisions by fiat or pull rank when we disagree with the decisions our youth leaders make. And think about this question: Which of these options will teach youth leaders more about leadership: 1) “I’m the Scoutmaster, and I say no smartphones.”) or 2) “Guys, you all remember the problem we had at summer camp last year when Johnny called his mom and she drove out to pick him up. How could you craft a policy that would prevent problems like that but still allow Scouts to use smartphones as a tool?”

Secrets of Philmont, Part 1

This week, I’ll be traveling to Philmont Scout Ranch to participate in a series of meetings. As I’ve been making travel plans, I’ve been thinking about why people go to the ranch–and how those reasons can improve your troop.

If you’ve ever been to Philmont, you know that getting there is not the easiest thing to do. Tucked into a remote corner of New Mexico, Philmont is 2 1/2 hours from the nearest airport–and 4 hours from the Denver airport, which most people fly into. The ranch is 20 miles from the nearest interstate and farther than that from the nearest big town. A consultant would never suggest building a Scout camp there. Yet every year, troops and crews from across the country flock to Philmont, often driving past or flying over other Scout camps that offer similar activities. In fact, as many groups are on the waiting list each year as actually get in.

Why? One reason is the sense of tradition. Philmont is 76 years old and has countless traditions, including the Philmont Hymn, the arrowhead patch you can only receive for completing a trek, its own lingo (for example, chipmunks and ground squirrels are called mini-bears), and songs and legends shared across generations of backcountry. Philmont has even spawned its own bands, like The Tobasco Donkeys.

But here’s where you and your troop come in. Traditions don’t have to be old to be appealing. Since Scouts can only stay in your troop for seven years, when you do something for just a few years in a row, it becomes a tradition, and your troop becomes that cool troop that does X, Y, or Z every year.

What sorts of traditions could enhance your troop’s mystique? Here’s a simple example:

Every spring, our troop holds what it calls the Golden Spoon campout. The patrols compete to prepare the best-tasting and best-looking dinner for a panel of adult judges, and the winning patrol gets to keep the Golden Spoon–a kitchen ladle spraypainted gold–for the year. It’s a simple tradition, but it gets the Scouts serious about cooking (our original intent) and has become a can’t-miss event. It’s also a great recruiting event for the Webelos dens that sometimes participate.

Other troops have other traditions: a polar-bear patch for Scouts that camp in below-zero temperatures, for example, or special privileges accorded to Scouts who’ve served as senior patrol leader.

What traditions does your troop have? How do they make a difference? Post your ideas in the comments section below.

Later this week: another secret of Philmont that you can use in your troop.

Conquering Context Collapse

On the blog recently, I wrote about It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, Danah Boyd’s landmark study on kids’ use of social media. The upshot of Boyd’s work is that the kids are (generally) alright, although they need caring adults to keep an eye on them in the online world.

Of course, most adults spend a lot of time online as well, and many Scout leaders are connected to their Scouts and their families via Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. (I always think it’s cool when a former Scout or youth group member sends me a connection request on LinkedIn, the business and professional counterpart to Facebook.) When we connect with our Scouts online, we need to be aware of context collapse.

What’s context collapse? It’s the situation where all your various worlds collide online, where your professional, family, and social lives intersect. Thanks to context collapse, your boss can see your vacation photos, your friends can see what you’re saying about work, and—most importantly for our purposes—your Scouts can see what you’re liking on Facebook, whether that’s Lolcats, a political cause, or your favorite microbrewery.

Context collapse happens in the real world, of course. You may go to church with troop families, for example, or you could happen to run into a Scout parent at a liquor store or political rally. But social media make context collapse an everyday occurrence.

So what can you do? One study I read offered three strategies:

1. Keep Scouting contacts out of your social networks.
2. Create separate social media accounts for Scouting.
3. Adopt a lowest-common-denominator approach where everything you post online is safe for all audiences.

Each strategy has its own advantages and disadvantages. I personally have adopted the third strategy. You’ll never see me post anything online that wouldn’t be appropriate for the youngest Scout to read, and if you want to know about my political leanings or adult-beverage preferences, you’ll have to ask.

You may adopt another strategy. That’s fine, but you do need to think about how context collapse affects the person your Scouts see when they visit your Facebook page.

Note: Before you interact with Scouts online, you should review the BSA’s social media guidelines. Youth Protection policies like two-deep leadership apply online, just as they apply at meetings and activities.

How do you deal with context collapse? The comments section is open.

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Need more great troop program ideas? Check out the new edition of The Scoutmaster’s Other Handbook, which is now available in both print and e-book formats at https://www.eaglebook.com/products.htm#scoutmasters.

Are the Kids Alright?

A few weeks back, I caught a fascinating interview on “Science Friday” with Danah Boyd, a social It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. I highly recommend you check it out.

For her book, Boyd interviewed hundreds of teens across the country over an eight-year period and came to a couple of important conclusions about kids and social media.

The first is that social media are today’s equivalent of the mall, the malt shop, the front stoop, and other teen hangouts of the past–a space whose relative privacy allows teens to explore who they are and what they believe about themselves and the world. When parents and other well-meaning adults are overly intrusive in an online forum like Facebook, kids either move on or engage in steganography, which means sending coded messages in plain sight. (Boyd cited the example of a girl who communicated her depression to those in the know–which didn’t include her prying mother–by posting song lyrics that were apparently upbeat but held a darker meaning.)

The second important conclusion is that the kids are, in general, alright. That’s not to say they don’t need caring adults looking out for them. In fact, she recommended that aunts and uncles and even Grandma can fill the gap when kids unfriend their parents or hide posts from them.

I would add Scout leaders to the caring adult category. I think it’s incumbent upon us to friend our Scouts on Facebook (assuming they accept our friend requests) and then keep an eye on what they’re saying online. This does not mean spying on them or finding dirt to bring up at a board of review; it simply means being alert to problems that ought to be discussed back in the real world.

Note: Before you interact with Scouts online, you should review the BSA’s social media guidelines. Youth Protection policies like two-deep leadership apply online, just as they apply at meetings and activities

This Minnesota Troop’s Scout Hut Is a Former Train Depot

According to Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs, shelter is a basic human need, along with food, water, and warmth. It’s pretty important to Scout troops, too. In many ways, where you meet affects how your program works. My first meeting place as a Boy Scout was a concrete-block Scout house about the size of my current living room. My next troop met in a National Guard armory and two surplus city/county buildings. When I was Scoutmaster, we had exclusive use of an old farmhouse on our church’s property. That house eventually gave way to parking, so we moved into the church building proper, where part of the old fellowship hall was built out to our specs, complete with a meeting room office, conference room, four patrol rooms, and storage.

All of these spaces had their good points and their limitations, but as I think about them, I’m reminded of one thing: shelter is just a basic need, for humans and troops alike. The important thing about a meeting place is that it support, not detract from, your program and allow your Scouts to climb Maslow’s hierarchy to the top: self-actualization.

How to Quickly Schedule Meetings and Events

In a perfect world, every meeting, outing, court of honor, and other activity in your troop would be scheduled months in advance at your annual program planning conference. Then, all you would have to do is publish one calendar each year, and everybody in the troop would know where to be and when to be there.

I don’t live in a perfect world, and I’m guessing you don’t either.

Throughout the year, things happen that require dates to be shuffled or added. Perhaps a troop committee meeting gets preempted by snow; perhaps an Eagle court of honor gets added to the schedule; perhaps you need to schedule an extra shakedown weekend for a high-adventure trip.

So how can you schedule or reschedule dates and ensure maximum participation? One great way is to create an online poll at Doodle.com. All you have to do is create a list of possible dates and times and invite Scouts, leaders, and families to vote. (Each poll has a unique URL that you can send out via email.) Respondents can choose multiple options, and you can tell at a glance who has voted and which option is the most popular.

Doodle is totally free to use, although you can subscribe to a premium service that offers more features. It’s a great way to eliminate the guesswork from scheduling and to maximize attendance at specially called meetings.

So what web services make your life as a Scouter easier? The comments section is open.

Secrets to Successful Scout Fundraising

Now that most of the country is on daylight savings time and daffodils are starting to sprout in my yard, it’s getting easier to believe that spring will really arrive this year. (I had my doubts during this long, cold winter.)

One sure sign of spring is that my troop has started selling mulch and bedding plants. In fact, I found an order form in my newspaper box just the other day.

I love this fundraising idea for a couple of reasons. First, people need to buy these products anyway. Second, people need to buy them year in and year out.

Troop 994 in Fairfax Station, Va., found a third reason to love selling mulch: the opportunity to upsell customers. I interviewed their Scoutmaster for a Scouting magazine article a few years ago and learned their secret: the receipt they leave each customer includes an offer to have Scouts return at a later date to spread the mulch they purchased for an additional fee. (Check out that article; it has some other great ideas.)

What are your unit’s secrets to fundraising success? The comments section is open.

The Very Best Way to Find Scouting Resources Online

Like most websites, Scouting.org is always under construction. That means finding what you’re looking for can be an adventure. And the built-in search engine, while much improved in recent years, is still not perfect.

So how can you find what you’re looking for? Start with Google. Create a search string that includes site:scouting.org. For example, if you’re looking for the Guide to Safe Scouting, use this search string: guide to safe scouting site:scouting.org. Virtually every time, the content you’re looking for will appear at the top of the search results Google returns.

But wait; there’s more, as all those infomercials promise. In recent years, the BSA has put many of its publications online in free PDF versions. (Ironically, this tends to boost sales rather than cannibalize them.) If you know the catalog or bin number of the publication you’re looking for, use that instead. For example, you can find the Guide to Awards and Insignia by using this search string: 33066 site:scouting.org.

(What’s the difference between a catalog number and a bin number? FIve- or six-digit catalog numbers generally go on items that are for sale, while bin numbers–which are hyphenated–go on free items.)