Four days in August
Four days, and a set of equipment every child took home. This is what happened, what it cost, and what we got wrong.
Where it ran
Summer Camp 2026 ran at Leaside Arena, on the Dr. Tom Pashby Play Safely Rink, which is the sheet our own paperwork keeps calling Midtown. We also funded places at our partner Hockey Fundamentals' camp at Ted Reeve Community Arena in the east end. Two ninety-minute sessions a day, eight thirty in the morning and one in the afternoon, Tuesday to Friday.
Ages five to eleven. Most of them had never been on skates. Lunch was free every day and came from Pizza Pizza. Every child went home with equipment that is theirs.
August
Day one
Registration tables in the lobby, a tower of skate boxes behind them, and a queue of families who had never done this before. Gear fitting took the whole morning, which is longer than we planned for and exactly as long as it needed. The first session went on in the afternoon: green jerseys, a talk off the ice, cones, and a hallway game of floor hockey for the children still waiting on skates.
August
Day two
Out to the park in the morning, instruction in a circle on the grass, ball hockey, lunch outdoors. Back on the ice in the afternoon for evaluation, where every camper was watched for half an hour and put into a group by what they could do rather than how old they were. Portraits were taken the same day, with names on masking tape because nobody had thought to bring name tags.
August
Day three
The most hockey of the four days. Drills in lanes, twenty pylons, four groups rotating. This was the day the first-time skaters stopped watching their feet. If you want to know what the camp is for, it is the ninety minutes on the Thursday afternoon when a child who could not stand up on Tuesday skates the length of the ice without falling.
August
Day four
The closing day. Final drills, the last prizes, gear bagged up and carried out to cars. We have no photographs of it. The photographer had finished on the Thursday and everybody who might have picked up a phone was busy getting every bag of equipment to the right family. It is the one part of this report with nothing to show you, and we would rather say that than put a picture of a different day in its place.
No photograph exists of this day.
The whole bill
A place at an Open Ice camp costs $1,060est.. That is one child, one camp, everything in: their equipment, their share of the ice, food for four days, prizes, and the insurance and administration without which a children’s camp cannot legally open its doors. Coaching is donated, so it is worth a great deal and it costs nothing, and we do not put it in the total.
The largest single line is equipment, at $750est. a child for a full set, all in. Ice is the second. At Leaside we pay $380 an hour and at Ted Reeve $150, and a four-day camp is twelve hours of ice at each.
Across every camp we have run, the total value handed to families is $38,360est.. Every figure in that model, and the arithmetic behind it, is on our numbers page.
The measurement we do not have yet
We can tell you what we put in. Hours of ice, pieces of equipment, meals, volunteers. We cannot yet tell you what came out, and that is the honest state of this organisation in August 2026.
Two instruments exist and are being run now. Every camper was scored on six skills on the first day and again on the last, on a one to five scale. Every guardian was asked the same set of confidence questions before the camp and after it. The survey closes on 22 August and we will publish the result in early September, with the sample size, the response rate and the instrument named, whatever the result says.
If it shows very little, we will publish that. A measurement you only report when it flatters you is not a measurement.
it
The people behind four days of ice
Hockey Stick Man supplied the equipment at a price no retailer would give a stranger. Pizza Pizza fed campers, coaches and volunteers every day for four days. MCW Consultants and Platform Insurance funded the parts of a camp nobody photographs. Leaside Hockey Association and Upper Canada College gave us places to be.
26 volunteers ran the floor, most of them teenagers, several of them former campers’ older siblings. And 41 people put their own money in through our fundraiser. The largest gift was $5,000, given quietly under a misspelling of the donor’s own name. The smallest was $5. We think about the second one more than the first.
wrong
Five things, written down
The Tuesday was too slow
Registration and gear fitting swallowed the entire first morning. Families waited, children who had come to skate stood in a lobby, and the on-ice time we lost on day one is time we never got back. Next camp, gear goes out the week before or in a separate session.
A parent was spoken to badly
On the first day a parent submitted a written complaint that they had been spoken to in a tone they found disrespectful, in front of other people. They were right to write it down. We did not have a standard for how staff and volunteers speak to families, and we are writing one.
Two out of five sizing forms came back wrong
Equipment sizing was collected in advance and a large share of it did not match the child who turned up. That is a form problem, not a parent problem. It cost us fitting time on the Tuesday and it meant some children skated in gear that was not quite theirs.
We could not tell you where our own camp was
Six of our own documents disagreed about where the summer camp ran, because one arena has two names in our files and a second arena was never written down alongside it. It ran at Leaside, and we also funded places at our partner Hockey Fundamentals' camp at Ted Reeve. Anyone reading our paperwork would have struggled to work that out, which is a record-keeping failure we have now fixed.
Nobody photographed the last day
See above. The single most emotional hour of the week, when children carry their own equipment out of an arena for the first time, does not exist in any form.
Next
The outcome measurement publishes in early September. The next camp is being booked. If you want a child in it, apply; if you want to pay for one, the button below does that.