Coming alone to a sports camp

August 22, 2026

– today we are not short of fitness options or holiday options. They are missing the right people to do the things with.

Every camp we have run has had them. One person, one booking, usually after two weeks of reading the site and one DM that starts with “this might be a stupid question, but.”

It is never a stupid question. It is always the same question: will it be weird if I come by myself?

The honest answer

The first two hours are slightly weird. Then it stops.

We are not going to tell you that everyone here arrives alone, because that would not be true. A camp is a mix. Some people book with a friend, some come as a pair, some arrive with three people from their club. And a real share of every group we have run booked on their own, and we would like more of them, because they are consistently the people who make the week what it is.

We are also not going to tell you that you will feel instantly at home the second you drop your bag, because that is not how arriving anywhere works. What we can tell you is what the week is built to do with that awkwardness.

Because here is the actual risk, named plainly: in a badly run week, the person who came alone orbits. The pairs have each other, the club has its in-jokes, and the solo booker spends five days being politely included. That is the failure mode, it is common, and every design decision below exists to prevent it.

The people who come alone are not the ones we accommodate. They are the reason the format works. They arrive with no one to retreat to, which means they talk to everyone, and a group with six of those people in it becomes a crew about three days faster than a group without them.

Why so many people are doing this

There is a real thing happening underneath this, and it is worth naming.

Adults are not short of fitness options or holiday options. They are short of people to do things with. Friendships that used to be maintained by proximity, the office, the neighbourhood, the club, now need to be scheduled, and scheduling is where they die. The places people used to meet without planning to are closing or moving online. Meanwhile remote work removed the last structure that put you in a room with the same humans every week.

So you end up with a very specific modern situation: a capable, social, busy person in their thirties with a good life and no obvious mechanism for meeting anyone new.

You cannot fix that by going to a gym class. You fix it with time. Days, not hours. Shared meals, shared physical effort, shared boredom in the afternoon, and one week where the same faces keep showing up. That is roughly the recipe for how humans have always made friends, and a camp is one of the few adult formats that still contains it.

Sport does something extra on top. It gives you a reason to talk to someone that is not talking. You are not making conversation, you are receiving a serve badly and laughing about it, and that turns out to be a faster route to knowing someone than dinner-party small talk.

What we actually do about it, in practice

Words are cheap here, so specifics.

No single supplement penalty for being one person. [shared rooms matched, single-rooms and shared rooms are both an option when booking with us] You are not charged extra for arriving without a partner.

Rooms are matched, not left to chance. Before coming in, we share a tailor-made questionnaire for each one of you arriving. People are asked before, not assigned on arrival.

The first dinner is one table or tapas shared, no seating plan. Not a networking format, not name badges. Everybody eats at once, on the first night, and the friends who arrived together get split up by the simple fact that there are not two seats next to each other.

Groups that arrive together get separated on court, on purpose. If four people from the same club book together, they are not spending the week playing each other. They came to meet people too, they just had a safer way of arriving.

Groups on court are by level, and they rotate. You are put with different people daily. By day three you have played with almost everyone, which means you have a small thing in common with almost everyone.

The founders host, they do not just coach. Milos and Mladen are on the sand, at the table, and on the hike. If someone is on the edge of the group on day one, that gets noticed and quietly fixed. This is the actual job, and it is the part no agenda can do for you.

Everything is optional and nobody comments on it. Taking the afternoon alone with a book is not read as a problem. Introverts have a good week here specifically because nothing is compulsory.

The one thing we ask

Come to the meals.

That is the whole social contract. Skip the sunrise stretch, skip the hike, work through the afternoon if you need to. Eat with everyone. Every group we have run has formed at a table, not on a court.

What it looks like a few months later

The measure we care about most is not how the week felt on Friday. It is what is still running in November.

The Ibiza group’s WhatsApp is still active. More then a half people from that week have booked the next camp. Few people from different countries who met at a camp and have since travelled together. Few couples are still together. There are people in that chat who now know each other better than they know some of their colleagues, and they met four months ago, on sand, having each individually worried that it would be weird to come alone.

If you are the person with the cursor over the button

You do not need to know anyone. You do not need to have played. You do not need to be an extrovert, and you do not need a story about why you are coming by yourself. Nobody will ask you for one.

Crete, 27 September to 3 October. Seven days, from 550eur camp-pass only, 170eur as a deposit to hold your spot. Book your week with us in the pearl of the beautiful Greece.

Stop doing it alone.