Announcing FencR Camps

Camps are the biggest week of a club's year. More new faces walk through the door during one summer camp than in three months of regular practice. The revenue matters, the first impressions matter more, and the whole thing runs on a compressed clock: announce, fill, collect, coach.

And yet most clubs still run camps the way they ran them in 2010. A flyer. A form. A spreadsheet with a column called PAID? that nobody fully trusts.

This is why we built FencR Camps: one place to build the camp page, run the camp schedule, and let signups handle themselves.

How most clubs run camps today

Talk to enough clubs and the same three setups keep coming up. None of them fit the work.

Path 1: Forms and spreadsheets. A Google Form feeds a sheet, payments arrive over Zelle and Venmo and checks, and a coach spends evenings matching names to deposits. It works until the week before camp, which is exactly when it stops working. Capacity is a guess, the age column is half empty, and "did the Hendersons pay for both kids?" is a text thread, not a record.

Path 2: A generic event platform. Real registration tools exist, and clubs use them. The catch is they know nothing about fencing and nothing about your club. They cannot put camp days on your club calendar, they cannot tell a practice from a private lesson, and they take a percentage of every registration to do it. Your camp lives on someone else's page, disconnected from everything else you run.

Path 3: Word of mouth and a phone number. Plenty of clubs just post a flyer and take calls. Every signup is a conversation, every payment is a chase, and the camp fills at whatever pace the coach's inbox allows. The families who did not already know the club never find it at all.

We built Camps because the club running the biggest week of its year deserves a tool built for it, connected to the schedule, the payments, and the roster it already has.

What you can do with FencR Camps

One place to build, fill, and run a camp. Here is the loop.

Build: a camp page families actually want to open

The Camp Page Builder shows the page exactly as fencers and parents will see it, and you edit it in place. Up to five photos with a cover you pick. Coaches from your roster, each with a bio that saves to your club so next summer starts pre-filled. Your venue, or a custom one with a real street address for this camp only. Rates like Full Camp or Day Pass, each with a price, an optional cap, and what it includes, counted in the same lessons and practice days language your club plans already use.

Publish, and the camp is live at fencr.app/camps and on your public club page.

Schedule: camp days that live on your real calendar

A camp schedule in FencR is not a paragraph of text. It is a mini week calendar of practice and lesson blocks: run one template every day, or customize each date. Click an empty time to add a block, click a block to edit it.

Then the part no form tool can do: every block mirrors onto your club schedule. Practices land as sessions your coaches see on their own calendars. Lesson blocks tile into individual bookable lesson slots at the length you choose, with a break between slots if you want one, and fencers book them exactly like any lesson at your club. Edit a session from the schedule view and the camp page follows. Edit the camp and the schedule follows. One record, two views.

Signups: instant, or by approval

Every camp picks one of two signup modes.

Instant signup is the fill-the-camp-fast mode. A family opens the page, picks who is attending, and pays through your club's Stripe account in one sitting. The spot is held while they check out and confirmed the moment payment lands.

Approval required is the mode for camps where fit matters. Fencers request a spot and send a short note: experience level, questions, anything the coaches should know. You see the request, the note, and the athlete, and you approve or deny. Payment opens only after approval, and the fencer is notified at every step.

Either way, anyone with a free FencR account can sign up. No club membership required, and registering never touches your roster: camp customers stay camp customers until you decide otherwise.

Run it: one table with every answer

Dashboard, then Camps, then Signups is the table you live in during camp season. Every registration across every camp: the athlete's name, age, and weapon, which camp and rate, who paid, and one clear status per row. Needs approval. Awaiting payment. Paid. Declined. Approval requests carry the family's note and Approve and Deny buttons right in the row, and a badge on the tab tells you when requests are waiting.

The page also shows what camp season is actually doing for the club: total signups, spots filled against capacity, and money collected, per camp and overall.

Get found: camps near you

Camps are also how new fencers find clubs. The public directory at fencr.app/camps lets anyone type an address or a ZIP code and see camps within 150 miles, sorted by distance, with the miles on each card. A family searching for a summer camp finds your club before they have ever heard its name.

What this means for your club

The camp page, the schedule, the signups, and the roster were never really separate jobs. They only felt separate because the tools were.

In FencR they are one loop: the page fills the camp, the signups fill the schedule, the schedule fills your coaches' calendars, and every dollar lands in your club's own Stripe account. FencR takes no cut and charges nothing for any of it, because FencR is free for every club, full stop.

If you run a club on FencR, Camps is in your sidebar now. Build the page this week and let the spreadsheet retire. And if your club is not on FencR yet, create your club for free and have a camp page live before practice ends.