Camp Visit: Decathlon Sports Club Offers Students a Glimpse of the Olympic Spirit

The Decathlon Sports Club offers a wide array of sports activities every summer at .

Perhaps most importantly, though, is how the program teaches youth the value of sportsmanship.

Also impressive is the Decathlon's track record of returning campers and counselors.

“It’s kind of like a big family now,” said Lauren Toulemonde, a junior in college and a counselor at the camp. “The fact that they teach the campers to play sports and teach them how to treat others well is great. It’s what my mom taught us, too.”

Toulemonde and her four siblings live and grew up in France but made it a habit to visit their grandmother every summer in Los Altos. As they grew old enought, their mother would sign them up for camp. Her youngest sibling is 12 and is still a camper, while she and several others work as counselors, and choose to come back every year.

The camp pays a special tribute to each person who has come back for five years, and that need not be consecutive, according to Scott Berridge, co-founder of the camp.

The camp has pictures of campers and counselors in its “hall of fame,” which features every camper to enter the prestigious role since 1986, five years after the camp was founded. The hall of fame also includes a photo of Springer School principal Wade Spenader as a camp counselor when he was inducted in 1994.

“When you’re 11 years old, five years is almost half your summers,” Berridge said.

Berridge and co-founder Rich Wohlstadter started the camp in 1981 in hopes of founding a place where “kids could just play” and learn the values and instruction they needed in a fun way. Wohlstadter runs the camp in Woodside while Berridge and his family runs the camp in Los Altos. 

Thirty years later, the camp is still going strong, holding on to its ideals and attracting campers to come back, year after year, and eventually become counselors themselves.

“When I was a kid, we’d play outside 'till the sun went down, all summer long,” Berridge said, and added that he is a physical education teacher in Antioch. “I don’t see that much anymore, so we tried to create that same type of experience at Decathlon.”

Berridge said, with his wife, all four of his now-grown children have been campers and worked at the camp as well. His son Jeff, a recent graduate of Notre Dame De Namur University in Belmont, and his daughter, Jill, worked at the camp this summer.

“Besides my family, this camp is what I’m most proud of,” Berridge said.

The camp offers sports like dodgeball, high-jump, flag football, soccer, hockey, tennis, basketball and track, and even indoor games like board games, according to Jeff Berridge. The counselors teach the campers the rules and basics of these activities, as well as good sportsmanship techniques, like the "Olympic motto," according to Scott Berridge. 

“I just enjoy doing this. It’s outdoors. It’s sports,” said Neal Swank, the Los Altos camp director. “I like the mission and philosophy of sportsmanship and being able to teach that at a young age.”