Raymond camp combines specialized athletic training with traditional summer experience.

RAYMOND – Summer camp.

The words dredge up images of carefree fun in the sun. Days spent swimming and playing games and nights around the campfire with friends new and old.

But that isn’t the only type of summer camp. Many athletes use the summer to try and improve their performance, and going to a specialized sports camp is one way to do that.

There are plenty of camps in southern Maine that offer instruction for athletes from elementary school to high school, college and beyond. Some camps specialize in one particular sport or discipline, but one camp in Raymond is trying to combine that traditional summer camp experience with the best of the specialized sports camps.

More than just sports

This summer is the first season for Slovenski Camps on Raymond’s Panther Pond. At the site of the former Camp Hawthorne, Bowdoin College track and cross country coach Peter Slovenski and his family have started a camp that offers a wide range of programs, including pole vaulting, strength and conditioning, lacrosse and even dodgeball. The Slovenski Camps even offer non-sporting options such as SAT prep and drama camp.

Slovenski, who has been the track and cross-country coach at Bowdoin since 1987, has experience running sports camps. He has directed a track camp at Bowdoin with Olympic gold medalist Dick Fosbury since 1991 and he has been the director of the Bowdoin College Day Camp for 22 years.

But it’s not all just sports at the Slovenski Camps. Each day there is time built in for more traditional recreational activities, such as swimming or just sitting by the lake reading a book, and Slovenski thinks those activities are as important as doing drills. The down time helps the campers become more well-rounded, he said, and that will help them on the playing field as well as in life.

“I’ve grown up in the liberal arts tradition of both academics and camping,” Slovenski said. “Even when we run specialty camps for SAT prep or running, we integrate a lot of variety in the program. All day long we are mixing athletics, arts and academics in the options and traditions of the camp. Our academic programs include a lot of swimming and field games. The athletic camps include poetry, music and recreational options. Being a better student can help you improve as an athlete, and being active can help you get smarter.”

While the numbers have been small at the Slovenski Camp this summer, averaging about 20 per week, that’s typical for any camp in its first season. Slovenski said he has been happy with the first summer.

“The response to our first summer has been encouraging,” he said. “We have enough campers to have good programs and pay the bills. We look forward to growing, but camps can get too big. We like to keep our programs small enough so that the campers benefit from lots of attention by our camp staff.”

And while there is a focus on a broad spectrum of activities, the camp is first and foremost a sport camp, and the Slovenski family has some strong credentials. Peter and his three sons, who help him run the camp, have all won Class A Maine state championships in the pole vault, with Peter winning in 1974, Steve Slovenski in 2005, Dave Slovenski in 2008 and the youngest, Mike, in 2010.

Steve Slovenski, who is working as a program director at the camp this summer, said when he graduated from Princeton in 2009, he wanted to be a camp director, which would be continuing a family tradition. “The whole family has a kind of strong involvement in the Maine camping experience,” he said.

Like his father, Steve is a strong believer in the idea that campers be exposed to more than just sports instruction at camp, adding that activities such as kayaking, swimming, beach volleyball, ping pong and tetherball are just as important.

“We try and include a lot of character education,” he said. “Teaching kids good values and manners and good principles to live their life by. We think that’s an important part of the camp experience. When you come to a camp for five whole days and you’re here 24 hours a day, you shouldn’t just learn how to get faster or how to pole vault better, you should learn a bit about the rest of life too. Each specific camp is very good technically, but we feel that there’s enough extra time in the day that they should also be improving themselves in other ways.”

While there is a focus on providing a complete camp experience, there is plenty of time for sports drills at the Slovenski camp, albeit with a unique summer camp twist.

Dave Slovenski, who is the program director for the strength and conditioning camp as well as a coach at the pole vaulting camp, said they try to incorporate some drills that kids wouldn’t normally do, things that are tailored to the camp atmosphere, such as chopping wood and using a two-person saw to cut down a tree. The campers also do sprints along the sandy beach and in the water.

Then there’s the water skiing.

While there is a power boat tied to the dock at the camp, it isn’t used for this drill, instead the skiers are pulled by people power instead of horsepower.

“We have five or six guys on the beach with a rope and a guy out in the water about 150-200 feet, then he gets ready and (the guys on shore) start running as fast as we can, pulling the rope and the (skier) holds on just like a motorboat and gets pulled up and comes into shore,” he explained.

While the drill seems unusual, it’s used to help build explosive power in the legs. “And it’s also a lot of fun,” Dave said. “We try and do a lot of things like that where it’s good exercise and they like to do it.”

‘It’s helped so much’

At camp this week, some local high school athletes said that they have seen an improvement in their performance even in the short time they have been working with the camp staff.

“It’s helped so much,” said Catherine Bailey, a junior on the Scarborough High School track team, as she waited for her chance to take another run at the vaulting bar.

The vaulters can take advantage of a wide range of equipment available to them, including poles of various sizes and weights and a video replay system, which is a camera hooked to a television and a digital video recorder that allows campers a chance to analyze their vaults in slow motion to help improve their technique.

Bailey, who learned of the camp through an e-mail sent out by the Scarborough High School track coach, said she’s been learning “actually how to pole vault” at the camp and that she thinks she has gained some valuable experience that will help her next season.

That’s a sentiment shared by her teammate and fellow Scarborough junior Andrea Tolman, who was also working on her vaulting technique last week.

Tolman said she came into the summer trying to find a place that would help her improve her technique. “I was trying to look for a pole vault camp, and this was a good opportunity,” she said.

And Tolman believes the work she’s doing this summer at camp will provide benefits down the road. Tolman said she felt the camp has helped her technique and she believed that would improve her performance. “I realized I had been doing quite a few things wrong, and changing them would help,” she said.

Dr. John Hoogasian, the pole vault coach at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., who is working as a councilor at the Slovenski Camp, said he agrees with the idea of mixing in other activities instead of the campers being focused on one sport all day, every day when they are at camp. He said, in an age of specialization, where young athletes pick a sport and play it year round, it’s healthy for younger athletes to broaden their focus.

“There’s so much specializing, the youngsters are going to find out sooner or later that there’s always somebody better, and you need to be flexible enough to try something different,” Hoogasian said. “When they get out there in life, they might find they have to change something, so it won’t be as radical for them.”

Dave Slovenski shows the strain on his face as he sprints through the water while pulling Lucas Hall in an inner tube during a speed drill last week at Slovenski Camps in Raymond.