Shane Brown ’02 can’t forget the first time he saw Camp Cheerio in his youth. “We’re driving up Highway 21, and we turned down this road,” he says. “There’s the big Camp Cheerio sign, and you have no idea when you go up Camp Cheerio Road that you’re going to pop out at this incredible view.”

That was 30 years ago when Brown, as a camper, first encountered the camp that is a destination for many young North Carolinians. The view is now something Brown sees daily from May to August, living on site in Alleghany County, N.C., as YMCA Camp Cheerio’s director of traditional camp and development. “I like to think summer camping has come a long way from [the 1979 movie] Meatballs,” he says, laughing. “Camp is doing better than ever. Camping, as an industry, seems to be doing pretty well.”

“Face-to-face communication is a really important thing to us. We talk about being disconnected from devices. That’s the thing parents really value.”

That’s despite kids living in an age of smartphones, social media and video games. It’s Brown’s job to make sure the campers and counselors communally see the off-screen world outside. “Face-to-face communication is a really important thing to us,” he says. “We talk about being disconnected from devices. That’s the thing parents really value.”

Brown, 48, spends his summer days up early before the morning’s flag raising and walking around the camp throughout the day. He loves jumping in the water for any paddle sport and joining any game he walks upon, with 9 Square in the Air being his favorite. 

The job doesn’t end when school starts every year and camp closes. It’s then that Brown and other staff members are back working from their home base, the YMCA of High Point (N.C.). They consider staffing needs for the camp’s following season and concentrate on raising private dollars to fund Camp Cheerio’s operations and staff.

It helps in the summer to have his wife, Cheri, a 2002 graduate of NC State at Camp Cheerio with him. She’s the camp’s director of groups and healthcare. And their two teenage kids, who’ve been mainstays at the camp, have absorbed the family passion for the life. “They would be in a cabin every week of the summer if we let them,” Brown says.  

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