#SenecaProud-

Season 2

Kelly Mathews

Episode 2: Kelly Mathews

Kelly Mathews is Manager, Sport Venue Operations & Community Recreation Programs. She is also Camp Director for King Day Camp and in this episode, she talks about what it takes to run one of Ontario’s largest day camps. Mathews is also a record holder for the fastest completion of the Oak Ridge Moraine Trail and author of two books. Her third, due out in 2020, will be on the definitive history of King Township.

Kelly Mathews Interview

Pat Perdue  00:01

Hey, I'm Pat Perdue, and I'd like to welcome you to Season Two of the Seneca Proud podcast. This is a co-production between my company Ycastr and Seneca College in Toronto. Seneca College is a really great school. And what we uncovered in season one of Seneca Proud is that there's a Seneca spirit. And that comes from the really great people that Seneca attracts. This season we'll be featuring some of those students, staff as well as faculty to not only learn what they do here, but also a little bit about who they are. So, join me on this journey of discovery, as we meet some of the people who make Seneca College, such a special place to teach, work and study. 

Welcome to Seneca Proud Season Two, where I get to introduce you to some of Seneca College's amazing family of staff, faculty and students. So if you haven't already, subscribe, and download and let's go meet some of the super inspiring folks here at Seneca. I'm Pat Perdue, and I'm glad you're here today. 

And welcome back to Season Two of the Seneca Proud podcast. This is Season Two, Episode Two and I'm Pat Perdue. That was a lot of words. So welcome back. Season Two of the Seneca Proud podcast is about bringing forward stories not only of the faculty but of students and staff and highlighting their achievements both while at Seneca and outside of Seneca.

Our guest this week is a perfect example of how excellence in their role at Seneca spills out into excellence and achievement in other areas. Kelly Mathews is Seneca College's Manager, Sport Venue Operations and Community Recreation programs. And she's also Director of a spectacular place known as the Seneca King Day Camp. In addition to everything else that makes Seneca College special. Seneca also boasts one of the largest day camps in Ontario. King Day Camp hosts 1000s of young people every summer in a unique outdoor experience that really has everything you can imagine in a summer camp, from boating to rock climbing, to truly being out in nature. And at about 30 minutes outside of Toronto at Seneca’s King campus. It's literally in our backyard. 

So let me tell you about our guest, Kelly Mathews. Kelly is Director of the camp and you'll hear from our conversation how passionate and dedicated Kelly is about providing simply the best experience possible both for her campers and also for her camp leadership staff. And you've probably heard the saying, we are more than our job. Well, at least I hope you've heard it. That certainly applies to Kelly, who is also among other things a published author. Kelly's first book is titled Eaton Hall: Pride of King Township and was published in 2015. Her second book, The Road to Marylake, was published in 2017. And she's currently at work on her third book, which will be a definitive history of King Township. And if that sounds like a lot, as the saying goes, wait, there's more! Kelly also holds the record for the fastest hike of the Oak Ridge Moraine Trail, 300 kilometers in seven days, which she used as a fundraising opportunity for Seneca College, as well as a donation to the Oak Ridge Moraine Trail just after the publication of her first book. 

Rather than recording in a studio I caught up with Kelly on location at King Day Camp, where we recorded our conversation outside on a picnic bench overlooking Lake Seneca. It was mid-autumn and the Fall colors were on full display. If it sounds spectacular, it was kind of spectacular. And now my conversation with Camp Director, Sports Venues Manager, published author and record breaker, Kelly Mathews.

 

Kelly Mathews  03:46

And are we walking or are we going to go sit somewhere?

 

Pat Perdue  03:49

I will follow you.

 

Kelly Mathews  03:51

We could grab a picnic table by the water and there we could sit under a cabin-zebo, and sit in the outdoor classroom. This is year-round. It's Seneca College’s Outdoor Education Center. But for the two months of the summer, this is home of King Day Camp. You're seeing McCutchen Island used to be called Recreation Island, and a whole host of buildings, little cubbies basically where kids can sit, you're seeing different climbing elements. Access to the water climbing homes. We've seen just a small snippet. So these are our baby elements. We have 14 aerial elements. We have zipline, high ropes, giant swing, flying squirrel, these are really impressive elements, but they're all “off islands”. Our language here is “on island” or “off island”.  We're on the island right now, “on islands”, and crossed a little culvert to get onto here.

 

Pat Perdue  04:40

And is there a different group of people for the camp that attend the camp “on island” versus “off island”?

 

Kelly Mathews  04:45

No, our camp is basically the entire campus except, you know, pass Magna Hall. We don't go to too much of the west side.  

 

Pat Perdue  04:54

Well, let's find a place to sit.

 

Kelly Mathews  04:56

Okay. Yeah, this is Lake Seneca. You sit on this side, you'll get the nice view. We're in what we call the “shoulder season”. So right now, we are operating not as a summer camp but as an outdoor education center. In the off season, our shoulder season, we are open to external school groups. So elementary schools and high schools will come here for their field trips. It could be skill development; it could be just a field trip for an experiential opportunity. The great majority of what we do in the Fall is actually targeted to Seneca College students. Faculty will book us, and we will usually customize a program. And that program could be anything from: a day of canoeing, as long as the weather allows; an opportunity to use the aerial elements; or it could be just group development work. But a lot of the students are using our space as well.

 

Pat Perdue  05:45

Wow. That's amazing. Tell me about your role here. What do you do?

 

Kelly Mathews  05:52

It's evolved. I've been with Seneca for about eight years now. And it does look a little bit different from when I started and all things change. So currently, my title is, if that matters, it's Sports Manager, Sport Venue Operations, and Community Recreation Programs. Eight years ago, it was Manager, King Day Camp, Seneca Outdoor Center and Community Recreation. So now we're sport venue operations for our three campuses, York, King and Newnham. I manage the operations, logistics, health and safety in those three spaces, working with college Health and Safety and college Facilities. And then under the umbrella of Community Recreation, we throw in King Day Camp community recreation programs in the Outdoor Center. It is actually rather big. It is the portfolio. It's big. It's always busy. But yeah, it's I think it's big. Yeah.

 

Pat Perdue  06:43

Yeah. Walk me through a day in the life of Kelly Mathews when it's during the summer.

 

Kelly Mathews  06:50

I'll be the first one sight a little after five in the morning, make sure nothing's happened to the site, because this is a living, breathing organism. You know, I've come in where the sailboats are in the middle of a lake because some random person came on site in a weekend and let them go. I'll get here early, open the property, make sure it's safe. And typically, that actually includes even in my role, throwing things into Lost and Found or laundry. It means getting all the water bottles out for the kids that are gonna forget their water bottles that day from something that benign. And then slowly as the minutes go by, different teams start to arrive and open up on island and off island elements. And then I'm at what we call D.P.K., which is drop-off, pickup King, that's near the log cabin at the front of the campus. And I'm there as a camp Director, rah rah, welcoming 500 Kids and 100 staff every day, every single day for two months. And that lasts from about 5:00 a.m. to 6 or 7:00 p.m. It’s depending on the health and safety items that come up over the course of the day. So, I'm an advanced medical first responder, so that's sort of the first point of contact for injury here or if we're dealing with an emergency. We also have hundreds of incidents over the course of the day, which could be anything from a nature pee, to a grass cut to something more serious, it could be a sprained ankle, whatever it is. But at the end of the day, I have to sign off on all of those. That takes up a good hour, two hours of my night. And depending on the severity or the complexity, some of those require phone calls home. 

 

Pat Perdue  08:45

And you're the person who does all of that stuff. You do the phone calls; you fill out the forms. 

Did you say your day starts at five in the morning and goes until around 5 a.m.? 

 

Kelly Mathews  08:55

Yeah, the day is typical. And that's a good day. I'd say the typical days in season are at least 12, if not 16 hours. They're busy days. And that is just fueled on adrenaline because remember, the rest of my portfolio doesn't close because Camp starts. I still have year-round committee recreation programs at Newnham.  I still have facility operations and staff working shifts from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 at night at the different campuses

 

Pat Perdue  09:18

And you're describing all of this with a smile on your face. I love it because you clearly love it. That's awesome.  

 

Kelly Mathews  09:24

I do. I love my team first and foremost. But I love what I do, where I do it and who I get to do with.

 

Pat Perdue  09:30

When we spoke on the phone prior to this you mentioned that being Camp Director was why you took the job at Seneca. What is it about being Camp Director that fires you up so much?

 

Kelly Mathews  09:41

I think what I love about my job the most, that part of the role is the leadership development part. So, I'm working with 100 staff that are college and university age. We work with them in the months leading up to the summer and we are every day. There are 1,000 little problems a day, and they're not necessarily problems, but there's 1,000 things that need a “yes” or “no”.  Or, “How do we fix this? What do we do?” I love working with them, seeing their growth from the start of the summer to the end. I've worked with some staff now, seasonally for eight years. And I've seen them as campers, as leaders in-training staff and new staff, and now they're our Leadership Team. It is satisfying, beyond satisfying, so that is, without a doubt the best part of the job. And then, of course, I love children. I'm in an environment where I'm surrounded by them for two months of the year. And I love the issues that come up and I love, I love the joy they have, when they get to experience something for the first time, or they've done something they never thought possible, or they push past a fear that they had no matter what it was. It's actually probably the most rewarding thing you can do.

 

Pat Perdue  10:45

That's amazing. Clearly, you love it, and with good reason. That's great. So that's two months. What happens for the remaining 10 months?

 

Kelly Mathews  10:55

Well, you know, it's funny, because I think a lot of people ask that question. And they think that summer ends on the last Friday of August, and then we go to sleep on this part of the portfolio. And that's not true, like so much to the point, we've had three, sort of post mortems, if you will, in the past summer. Since that time, we have our hire packages for next summer go out on Friday, November 1 every year. We have already decided what we're going to cut and where we're going to develop. We've looked at all of our stats from this year, anything from, as uninteresting as, what bus routes are really pulling in participants to where we should be growing markets that we haven't touched yet and we want to bring to the site. So, we've done all of that evaluation. And now we're already ready to start working on next year. 

 

Pat Perdue  11:41

That sounds like a tonne of meetings.

 

Kelly Mathews  11:43

It is a lot of meetings. It's a of consultation. There's a lot of conversations. And a lot of communication. Also, we're taking in feedback. We have feedback from campers, feedback from our supervisors, from our parents from each other on opinions of working together and working here. There's a lot of stuff to vet in terms of determining what is working and what's not working, because some things that are working for us are not working for, say a parent.

 

Pat Perdue  12:11

How do you get the voice of the parent into that conversation?

 

Kelly Mathews  12:14

We do it through surveys. We have one of the biggest summer camps in the province of Ontario. We can't really engage with every one of our families. And a good percentage are so far from us that the kids are bussing in from North York. They're not a part of our local community, if you will. Our community is a bit broader than King. But we do it through surveys, we do an email survey that goes out on the last day of a session. And then each week, we have our staff meeting with everybody first thing in the morning at 8:15 on the Monday when we get a new batch of kids. And that Monday I'm sharing with the staff. One of the consistent complaints we might have had is a couple little red noses this week. And it's something that simple just to be more conscious of, you know, sunblock and some safety this week. Or it could be feedback from parents of things that we're doing really, really well. “Let's keep that up. They really enjoyed that.” We have a 98.7% exceeds expectation rating. We've had that for the last five years. And I think with every with every batch of data that we get, so that comes in on a weekly basis, you know, there's always a skew, you can pull off the top one, pull off the bottom one, and we're sitting really high.

 

Pat Perdue  13:23

That's great. Well, congratulations. And that all comes from all that planning and the planning for the next year, the next season comes to an end November 1.

 

Kelly Mathews  13:32

Well, by this Friday, we're done. Now our hire package is done. It's a massive document and four different types of applications, depending on what you're coming to us for: returning staff, new staff, leader and leader in-training staff and training. By Friday they’ll be out to everyone who’s sitting at home waiting to see what their job might look like next summer. They're due back to us by December 1, and we started hiring December, January. We capture these kids before they have a chance to go anywhere.

 

Pat Perdue  14:00

And obviously you have a lot of returning staff as well.

 

Kelly Mathews  14:03

We’re a little bit above the healthy average, probably around 70 75%. One of the sorts of stipulations with running summer camps here is that our staff, they're a part of a group called Appendix G, which means that they need to be returning to an academic institution in the fall, whether it be high school, college or university. They basically age out at some point if they’re not a returning student, the summer after they work with us. They move on to the world. 

 

Pat Perdue  14:33

Right, right. Oh, it's sort of bittersweet.

 

Kelly Mathews  14:34

It's painful. Yeah, it's really the last day of camp. You know, we do something called “camp wide cleanup” and everyone just runs around like bees for four hours and we basically return the property and the campus back to the College at that point and we do a debrief here, a closing flagpole. And I have 100 people and I'd say 75% of them are just bawling, myself included. We're sad. It's so intense over such a short duration of time, that it's really emotional. It's over. Every year it's sad to say goodbye. It's really hard. 

 

Pat Perdue  15:04

Wow, I can imagine. How rewarding.

 

Kelly Mathews  15:06

It's incredibly rewarding. Yeah, I don't know what else is like that. Even teaching is over a longer period of time. It's just so intense and our bursts with campers are usually a week long. The staff were together for eight weeks, but we're training leading up to that. The days are long for everybody. There's not much that's like that. Yeah.

 

Pat Perdue  15:25

Right. Right. And so that happens in November and then December you're hiring. But you've got another job too, it's not like your world comes to an end. 

 

Kelly Mathews  15:34

No, it doesn't. So Community Recreation, we have three periods of hiring for programs at Newnham. We have a Fall season a Winter, Spring and a Summer. So that's we're right now, we're in our fall programs over at Newnham, but I'm right now proofing the guidebook for our Winter/Spring programs. You know, facility operations and ongoing maintenance and rentals are happening in all of our campuses. So there are contracts coming in every day for those initiatives. And there's policy adjustments, there's incidents that occur and managing those incidences, and, yeah, it's just, it's a lot. 

 

Pat Perdue  16:05

It's a lot and you're doing things on the side.

 

Kelly Mathews  16:08

I am doing things on the side.  

 

Pat Perdue  16:11

Because you're a published author. How do you feel about that title, Published Author?

 

Kelly Mathews  16:13

I don't know how I feel about the use of the word author. I keep saying I happen to have written a couple of books but I don't feel comfortable with that title yet. 

 

Pat Perdue  16:22

Share with us the books that you've written and the role Seneca College has played in that.

 

Kelly Mathews  16:28

Gosh, where to start? In terms of the support. It's been incredible. I've written two books. One in 2015 was on a Seneca owned landmark, Eaton Hall which you can just see off to your left, the castle, Eaton Hall: Pride of King Township. Then in 2017, the adjacent property to our west, it's an Augustinian monastery, now it's called Marylake; the second book was The Road to Marylake. The two properties have so many synergies to it. Just the one main being that the original property owner pre-Eaton was Sir Henry Mill Pellatt of Castle Loma. He owned a couple 100 acres on Seneca site that we now own. He also owned and built Castle Loma and he owned the property next door. When I wrote Eaton Hall, it was a natural evolution to start the history over there. And now I'm commissioned to write a book by the Historical Society of King Township; to write the definitive history of King Township. 

 

Pat Perdue  17:26

How cool is that?

 

Kelly Mathews  17:28

Cool?! Sure. Sure, it’s cool. It’s overwhelming, painful, exciting. I say every great high is coupled with a really scary word. So, I would say it's exciting, it's overwhelming, it's thrilling, it's humbling, it's a great opportunity, it's too much for me. It's very polarizing.

 

Pat Perdue  17:52

And this is something you're looking forward to doing or something you're looking forward to having completed.?

 

Kelly Mathews  17:56

You know, great question. I'm in the process right now. I've done the bulk of the research, and I'm in the writing stage, it's supposed to go to the publisher of the first manuscript in June 2020. I can't see that happening at this point, but...

 

Pat Perdue  18:10

They're listening right now.

 

Kelly Mathews  18:13

They know, those that have commissioned this work, they know the stress that I feel. It's about 20 to 30 hours of writing every week outside of a full-time job. And I'm feeling it. In all areas of my life. I knew exactly what I was getting into. I've done this twice before. This is a bit scarier, because I wrote those books for me. And this one is writing specifically for someone else, it's their property. So there's different stresses that come with that.

 

Pat Perdue  18:40

And in your day, do you set aside very specific times during the day to write? 

 

Kelly Mathews  18:47

When you're writing you have to, because I don't take a day off. Because of my work cycle. I don't take time off May 1 to September 1. I use a lot of my vacation time for writing, I'll take off the Fridays in the fall, so that I can get three good days of writing into the weekend. So right now, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, I'm pretty much writing 10 hours a day. I just get into my pajamas. I have over 100,000 words to get on paper. I need the time. I try to give a couple of hours on weekday evenings, but it's too exhausting. It's just too much and I don't feel that I have just the right frame of mind to write. Yeah, so I give myself three days.

 

Pat Perdue  19:32

And that's hard writing as opposed to research and writing and taking notes.

 

Kelly Mathews  19:36

Yeah, that's sitting at a keyboard. The last year has really been spent out to the archives looking for some great primary sources with the National Archives provincial, the township, other neat archives that I didn't know existed. York Region, District Public School Board has their own archives, which has been helpful. The first sort of year of this commission has been out gathering content and formulating thoughts and now I'm in the stage where I'm putting it on paper, if you will. 

 

Pat Perdue  20:02

And tell me the role that Seneca College plays in that.

 

Kelly Mathews  20:07

So first of all, just the fact I have the support of my employer, just at every level of leadership above me and there's many levels. Everyone is always checking in and asking how things are going. Seneca hosted the book launch for “Eaton Halll”. Most of the senior leadership at the college was there as well as members of the Eaton family. And that's in my mind as still one of my favorite days ever. I really felt like a princess that day in a castle, it was a really amazing day for me. And to have the college manage that event, that was such an amazing feeling. And then with the “Marylake” book coming out, we did a book launch event next door and a great majority of the leadership at Seneca College was there and that was really humbling and amazing. It feels really great to know that the people that I'm working for and with have a sense of what I do outside of my job. And that feels, that's really neat.

 

Pat Perdue  21:06

And that's, you know, a big part of this season's podcast, it’s discovering the lives that people lead when they're not at Seneca right? And this is not the only thing that you do you know, when folks were describing you to me and saying, “Hey, you have to get Kelly on the podcast.”, they talked about this walk that you did. Can you walk us through? No pun intended; no pun intended.

 

Kelly Mathews  21:27

Yes. So basically, when “Eaton Hall” was finished, it was my first book, it was such a great experience, I had so much support from the College. And during that time, I was using the Oak Ridges Moraine Trail every day to get out for an hour, get in a run, get in a hike and then get back to it. I'm not so good at that right now. But I'll get back on that. And when it was over, I kind of thought this would be a great time to give back because I really felt that my employer had gone above and beyond in terms of providing support. And I think it was amazing that one of the resources I use from just a break from my desk was this amazing network of trails, 300 kilometers across this province managed by volunteers. So, I decided I'm going to hike that trail that I use from start to finish, it's called end to end. And I knew that there was a record of someone hiking it in nine days. I just did the math. And if you broke it out a little more than a marathon a day would get it into seven days.

 

Pat Perdue  22:18

Just, “a little more than a marathon a day”! 

 

Kelly Mathews  22:21

“Just”, it rolls off the tongue much easier now, it didn't roll off so easily pre hike. So yeah, I had hoped to raise $5,000 at that time and give $2,500 to the Oak Ridge Trail and $2,500 to the Seneca King build fund. This is pre Magna Hall. And actually, the support was great. We just missed $10,000, almost doubled what the objective was. And I was able to give about $5,000 to each charity, and that felt really cool. And it was a nice way to give back. And I continue to feel overwhelmed by the support that I have from my employer.

 

Pat Perdue  22:56

And the cycle continues. So, you’re a record holder.

 

Kelly Mathews  23:00

I actually have a record! I have a plaque and I have a badge. It's really cool. 

 

Pat Perdue  23:06

In addition to the book that you're working on, right now that we spoke about, what's on the horizon for you and your role here at the campus? Or if you're going to project your mind into the campus a few years from now, what might that look like?

 

Kelly Mathews  23:22

Well, I think, for me, I definitely will take a break from writing when this one's done.  Actually, I said I wouldn't write anything again. And then this happens. I keep finding that life just happens. And you can take it or leave it. And I tend to take it so I'm sure I'll be busy with something. But in terms of the college, we have a brand-new Director, Julian McCullough, who has come from New York University. She's been with us for not even a month now, so there's new leadership there. As of just a week ago, there was a bit of change in portfolios. We have a new Dean. Mark Solomon, who is now representing Student Services. I think that it's difficult to predict what I think my role might look like. Because with the leadership changes, there's many different ways the role could evolve. I'm very happy with what I'm doing right now. And I'm very happy with my portfolio. But there's gaps, and there's opportunity in anything. And I think with new perspectives and new vision and new leadership, I think new things are going to pop up and there's going to be change for sure. 

 

Pat Perdue  24:21

Yes, so positive!  Clearly, the Camp and the College are both really lucky to have you. And thank you very much for spending the time on this podcast. 

 

Kelly Mathews  24:28

My pleasure.   

 

Pat Perdue  24:33

Yeah. Wow. Thank you so much. 

That was my conversation with Seneca College’s, King Day Camp Director and Manager Sports Venue Operations and Community Recreation Programs, Kelly Mathews. And I think you'd agree if there's one word that defines Kelly, it's passion. Whether it's her work at the day camp, and the deep level of satisfaction she gets from working with both staff and the campers and her work outside of Seneca in writing what soon will be three books. Oh, yeah. And one thing I loved, she's like, “I'm gonna hike the length of the Oak Ridge Moraine Trail. And I'm going to do it faster than anybody else.” I also love how Seneca College as an employer, facilitated and really supported Kelly's extracurricular pursuits. So, as we crack the code for what makes Seneca as unique as it is, maybe it has something to do with the formula of attracting great people, and just letting them be great. Both of Kelly's published books, Eaton Hall: Pride of King Township, and The Road to Marylake are available on Amazon. I've included links to them in the show notes*. This has been the Seneca Proud podcast. If you like what you're heard, tell somebody or leave us a review and rating on Apple podcasts. Thank you again to Kelly Mathews and thank you for listening. I'm Pat Perdue. Stay proud Seneca!

 

*Eaton Hall: Pride of King Township

The Road to Marylake