Mega Sports Camp addresses affordable child care needs

One of the main goals of Centerville Community Church’s Mega Sports Camp is to address “the real need for affordable formal child care” in the community, according to Lead Pastor and Councilman Justin Wright. The fourth annual one-week sports camp ran from Monday, June 4th to Friday, June 8th at the church located at 401 Wilson Drive. Although the camp activities were officially set to begin each day at 9:00 a.m. and end at 3:30 p.m., parents were allowed to drop their children off as early as 8:00 a.m. and pick them up as late as 5:30 p.m. The church included these additional benefits because they wanted to ensure maximum time for minimum cost to parents. Wright stated that although they broke even, they wanted to make sure they provided “a week’s worth of child care to serve our community better;” they wanted to significantly help parents’ summer budgets.

The total cost for the week was $35 per child with some specials available, like an early bird rate. Each child was provided with a ball for his/her sport of choice (basketball, football, soccer, or cheerleading) or a set of pom-poms for cheerleading (which cost $5 more because they used official pom-poms) and a T-shirt, along with daily breakfast and lunch.

“Mega Sports Camp curriculum is a nationally available program. I’m the first to do one in Middle Georgia. I started it here four years ago [and] there are other churches that are now running MSC’s based on our model,” stated Wright. Upon arrival to the church in 2013, he noticed that it was located in a neighborhood full of children, yet there were none at all attending the church. They had an acre and a half of land and wanted to offer summer outreaches to connect with the community. After looking into a few options, they wanted to do something a little different, and since Wright has a background in recreational sports from Mercer University, he chose sports as the theme. “It’s a bible camp based around a sports camp,” he explained.

The first year began with 25 pre-registered children; however, a total of 75 actually arrived on the first day. With 92 current attendees, the yearly average has been approximately 100. Wright explains that it has grown and “become a regional thing” and includes children who travel from Warner Robins, Perry, Kathleen, Bonaire, Byron, and Macon. The program also currently has 20 volunteers, many of whom are high school students, and some who arrived during the first year and have since joined the church and become coaches, helpers, and volunteer leaders. And “it’s not just about growing our church, you know, we love that when it happens, but many of the people who come here – their kids go to other churches, and that’s fine; certainly one of our goals is to reach people who aren’t connected with the community of faith like ours. But really, it’s just to try to serve this community. It’s all of us working together.”

The camp received assistance from other partners throughout the community as well; the Centerville Fire Department and Chief Jason Jones offered them access to their ice machine (saving the camp hundreds of dollars) and the children’s meals were provided by the school system’s summer feeding program and were cooked at Northside High School. Thanks to a fellow church in McDonough that provided free water slides, they were able to have a water day with high quality equipment for the children in the middle of the week. “It’s a real community effort and we’re very proud of that,” said Wright. In fact, he continued on to explain that after enduring a few name changes since 1964, the church was renamed Centerville Community Church in 2013 because they felt it “was the clearest statement of who we wanted to be; we wanted to be able to serve this community the best we could.”

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