Steve Cusick started going to Summer at Friends day camps when he was four years old. Today, he’s director of the eight-week day camp program, a job he has held since 2019.
One of the most satisfying parts of his job, he says, is helping campers grow and mature during their counselor-in-training (CIT) summer, and watching them thrive later as counselors themselves.
“One of the big things we hear from counselors in training is that they had a great experience as a camper and they want to pay it forward, to keep the magic of camp happening,” he says.
Cusick remembers well his own counselor-in-training summer, and how it prepared him for a lifetime of summer camp leadership and joy. “I’ve been a camp employee since I was a counselor in training,” he says.
CIT summers are a beloved staple of both day and overnight summer camps in the Baltimore region and beyond.
Each camp has its own traditions and programs for helping teens move from carefree campers to responsible counselors. Some programs are just a couple of weeks long while others span several summers. But all share a devotion to creating fun, safe settings for both campers and counselors-to-be, with opportunities to learn and grow in a familiar, nurturing setting.
For many young people, working as a camp counselor is their first real job. Counselor-in-training programs give them their first experiences with applications and interviews, teach the importance of showing up on time and doing a job well, provide training, deliver important feedback, and prepare them for even more responsibilities as future camp counselors.
For all the responsibilities that a CIT summer entails, it is also a time of fun and friendship, one that many CITs remember with fondness. Often, they have attended the same camp for years, and have come to know and admire their CITs and counselors. Finally, they get to emulate the best qualities of those leaders.
At Friends, says Cusick, the gradual transition from camper to counselor begins at age 12 or 13, when a first assignment might be to run an activity station during field day.
“When they’re 14, we start talking about how to apply to be a CIT,” he says. Counselors in training go through the same application process as staff, which means they must submit letters of recommendation and participate in interviews, he says.
The ones who are accepted – and can commit to working at least one of the summer’s four-week sessions – are grouped so that two CITs, an older-teen assistant counselor, and a college-aged head counselor share responsibility for a group of up to 12 campers. (Counselors in training don’t get paid, though they can get service-hour credits for their schools. Assistant counselors and head counselors do get paid.) They also have a better shot at getting hired as assistant or head counselors in future years, says Cusick.
The CITS are in some ways the face of the camp, interacting with parents during pick-up and drop-off, says Cusick. “They have a lot of face time with the families and with the kids,” he says.
Cusick says CITs tend to adjust well to their new responsibilities, partly because they are close in age to the campers they are guiding. “Often they’re able to relate to the campers in a way that is different from an adult,” he says.
At McDonogh School, which has been offering summer camps for more than 80 years, the two-week CIT program teaches teens 14 to 16 CPR, first aid, and other skills.
Most mornings, the CITs get two hours of instruction, says Ramzi Sifri, who has been assistant director and then director of McDonogh summer camps for 22 years. After lunch, they help the counselors who are working with campers aged four through 12.
A key learning experience for the CITs is that they are evaluated by each counselor, as well as by camp leaders. “If they’re successful in the CIT program, they get a certificate,” says Sifri. As many as 85 percent return as counselors.
The whole experience, he says, “gives young people the opportunity to learn a little about the work ethic and the patience it takes to work with campers of all ages, as well as how to be a leader and how to work cooperatively with other counselors.”
The summer camps at the Park School of Baltimore include a two-week counselor-in-training program for campers between 12 and 15 years old, says Jimmy Bonner, lead instructor for the Park Camp’s Leadership Development and Counselor in Training (CIT) program.
The CITs assist the lead and junior counselors with activities for campers aged three and a half to 10 and meet with Bonner to talk about successes and challenges.
The program includes a training program “that focuses on camper management, leadership, self-advocacy, and professionalism,” says Bonner, in order to give CITs the tools to become camp counselors, if that’s what they want.
“Many CITs are first on the list for counselor jobs as they age into a full-time paying position as a Park Camps counselor,” he says. “However, our main goal is to inspire responsibility and confidence in a burgeoning generation of young adults.”
Bonner, like other leaders of CIT programs, notes that the affection between campers and CITs is mutual, and a key component of camp success. “You’d be hard-pressed to find a CIT without a crowd of campers fluttering around them during recess,” he says.
Alicia Berlin, director of Camp Louise, notes that the CIT programs at the all-girl Jewish overnight camp in Cascade date back to at least the 1940s, and that she was one in 1987. The program takes teens from camper to counselor over the course of three summers with training sessions and a growing roster of responsibilities.
Berlin says she interviews every CIT at the end of the summer and asks them about their experiences. “I always ask them, who was the counselor you strive to be like and what are the characteristics of that person that you most admire? They want to be for their campers what other counselors were for them.”
She notes that being a counselor isn’t easy. “It’s 24/7,” she says, and it involves waking up in the night to comfort a child who is homesick, or keeping young campers entertained on a rainy day that forced a change of plans.
Rising 10th graders are known as senior trainees, or STs, with responsibilities that might include leading a camp activity and helping with Louise Lends a Hand, a program that teaches kindness through charitable acts such as making cookies and sandwiches to donate.
The following year, the counselor assistants, or CAs, work directly with younger campers, serving as mentors and planning activities.
While STs and CAs are required to stay for either the three-week or the four-week session of their trainee summer, the CITs stay for all seven weeks.
These rising high school seniors are assigned departments, such as a particular sport or art form, and receive training in leadership, mental health, first aid, and other ways to help children, says Berlin, who has been Camp Louise director for 17 years.
“They’re living together as CITs, and they are mentored by counselors,” she says. CITs are also, in some ways, the face of the camp. They’re the ones who greet campers and parents on opening day, who walk the campers to their bunks, who perform in welcome shows.
Seth Tow, who went from camper to CIT to counselor at Camp Airy, the brother camp to Camp Louise, based in Thurmont, remembers his CIT summer well. Tow, now 26, started going to Camp Airy when he was nine and “got hooked on camp pretty quickly,” he says.
Tow, like his younger brothers Josh and Danny, went through the training programs and worked as a counselor for several summers.
“They still wanted to be campers but they also wanted more responsibility,” says their mother, Debbie Tow, of Howard County. All her sons, she says, “just loved the camp. They wanted as much camp as they could get. Every year we picked them up they wanted more.”
Seth says the transition from camper to counselor was so gradual that he never felt particularly stressed about each new level of responsibility.
He also remembers his CIT summer as a time of particularly strong bonding with his peers. “A lot of those sort of bonding activities that you do to get closer with the rest of your group kind of stick with you,” he says. “Some of my friends still talk about it to this day.”
In fact, notes his mom, “the boys grow so close during CIT summer that it carries forward long after the summer ends.” Her son Danny, she says, still gets together with his CIT friends every New Year’s Eve, four years after that magical summer.
This article is part of the 2024 Guide to Summer Camps.
