RYLA Boys’ Camp 2026 - What you need to know...

Well, one very obvious example is the Rotary Youth Leadership Awards, or RYLA for short. Started in Queensland way back in 1959 – incidentally an excellent year given that it marks your correspondent’s arrival into the world – RYLA flourished and progressively extended its influence across the globe. Rotary GB&I’s take on RYLA varies from one District to another, with our own D1010 opting for one-week residential camps for boys and girls respectively, aged sixteen and seventeen, at the Abernethy Trust’s outward-bound centre at Nethy Bridge in the Cairngorms National Park. What they all share in common, however, is an adherence to the RYLA’s seven ‘C’s: Commitment; Communication; Character; Competition; Confidence; Courage; and Cheerfulness. The underlying object is to develop leadership qualities, to give participants a sense of pride in their achievements, stimulate mind and body, and in doing so to emphasise the importance of sportsmanship, fitness, determination and personal relationships.

So it is that on a bright and balmy summer’s morning a slightly apprehensive group of young men, supported by family, friends and a light dusting of local Rotarians, find themselves in the Riverside Tesco car park and about to board a northbound coach, next stop: Adventure. With farewells exchanged and, it must be said, the odd tear shed (mostly from mums and grans), the boys are on their way. At the other end of the District the same scene plays out, and at 12:30 pm sharp the southern and northern coaches converge at their destination and disgorge their by now excited passengers. 

Thus delivered safely, camp leader Gav takes charge and allocates the boys to each of the six team mentors, some of whom are new to RYLA while others have tucked under their well-worn outdoor kit a decade or two of mentoring experience, and with whom the boys will spend the next seven days.  With rooms allocated, dinner dispatched in record time and teams briefed by their mentors on the days ahead, the stage is set for a week packed with challenge and reward, leadership and teamworking, and plenty of - frequently watery – fun.

My team for the week presents a broad cross section of RYLA boys*: Gareth, 17, runs his own car and his own business, building websites for local clients; Tom is an anxious, pensive young man; Fraser knows all about the DNA of seaweed (really); Rory and Donald are both competitive swimmers; Joseph is clearly the team joker with a comedy voice for every occasion; Lewis’s best Cheeky Chappy persona belies his shyness; and hesitant Mark is dealing with his own challenges and doesn’t swim. Or cycle. This is not atypical, and while sponsoring clubs apply similar selection criteria there are so many variables that the net result is a contingent representing a wide spectrum of young society.

*All names have been changed and the individuals described are an amalgam of RYLA boys past and present. It’s all still true though, in the broadest sense. Generally.

We are soon into Day One, with gorge walking top of the agenda. Once into wetsuits, gorge-suits, helmets and buoyancy aids, all agree that the name hardly does justice to what is a full-on activity, with teammates pushing and pulling each other up a steep and slippery gorge against the river’s flow.  Maybe ‘gorge-diving’ or just ‘gorgeing’ would better cover it.

Suitably soaked and invigorated, it’s back to camp for Timebomb Tim, a fiendishly concocted mixture of navigation, problems solving, teamwork and leadership, all against the clock. Clues are followed, bombs - seven in all - are found, sometimes high aloft, maybe submerged, occasionally hidden in plain sight, and defused, and the team finally collapses into a heap. Only to find themselves being briefed on tomorrow’s activities, in my team’s case rock climbing and abseiling. Phew.

As the week progresses with hillwalking – due to wildfires relocated from its usual venue, raft-building, mountain biking and other challenges, Tom finds his feet and progressively engages with his fellows, Lewis relaxes into being himself, Fraser and Mark find common ground in marine biology, and Rory and Donald prove to be not just kindred spirits but also the team’s secret weapons when it comes to anything aquatic and in particular the swimming gala. Gareth provides a natural focus for the team and Joseph, well Joseph – he sees his job as team entertainer-in-chief and, to be fair, he’s pretty good at it.

In what feels like the passage of almost no time at all, it is the final day, Day 7, and not only are the team scheduled for coasteering but are also putting the finishing touches to their end-of-camp presentation, traditionally and predictably fairly dire as weary participants struggle to pull together a meaningful 5-minutes that encapsulates the week’s experiences. The coasteering – floating, swimming, climbing and jumping - is a blast, as the boys discover reserves of determination and, in some cases, courage, hitherto hidden well below the surface. Being teenage boys, they also discover that they have left their trainers/towel/phone/underpants ‘somewhere on the beach’, but after these are retrieved it’s all aboard the minibus back to Nethy Bridge for the presentations.

My team are up first, and it must be said that by boys’ camp standards it’s undeniably impressive, with a convincing newsroom backdrop on the screen behind them (well done, Gareth), pre-recorded outside broadcasts from ‘correspondents’ (team members and mentor) in the field, and a running gag concerning Joseph and a roll of duct tape – you probably had to be there. The bar has been set quite high and is scarcely troubled thereafter; once again, the Edinburgh Fringe has little to worry about. The team’s presentation is duly declared the winning effort, the icing on the cake being that team member Rory has secured the Geekie endeavour trophy when it turns out that he has patiently and diligently spent his evenings teaching Dave from another team to swim.  If that’s the icing, the cherry on top of that is Gav’s announcement that overall winners for the week are none other than our very own team. Quite a week. Quite a conclusion.

Thanks are due to all – sponsoring Rotary Clubs including our own, the D1010 RYLA team, without whose hard work and inspiration none of this would happen, the Abernethy instructors and staff, the mentors - and, most importantly, the boys themselves, who collectively both make, and are made by, RYLA.  Long may it continue.