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An Interview with Mark Hancock, CEO Trail Life USA.
More than ever, boys need a uniquely masculine program where their assertive, audacious, and adventurous nature is celebrated, not sequestered.
Trail Life USA provides a Christ-Centered, Boy-focused environment where boys thrive! Adults are equipped to lead a program in a structured outdoor environment where boys are engaged in real-world challenge and experience camping, hiking, and fishing; they develop skills in riflery, archery, and canoeing; and learn character, leadership, and service in a practical hands-on manner that is naturally engaging.
In the outdoors, the experience of adults is never obsolete; boys find mentors, fathers and sons connect, important relationships are fostered, and boys find opportunity to achieve significant accomplishment. Find a Troop near you or Start one today at Trail Life USA.
Listen to our interview with Mark Hancock.
(length: 33 minutes)
Mark Hancock is the Director of Trail Life USA. Below are some highlights of his conversation with Faith & Fitness Magazine. Read the highlights now but be sure to listen to the entire audio interview because it offers so much more depth and insight into how Trail Life USA can be a powerful life experience in helping boys become strong in character maturing into men who bring great value to their family and community.
-Brad Bloom, Publisher
I REALIZED I CAN DO HARD THINGS
There was a family in North Carolina where suddenly the father was out of the home. The mother was left with four boys and a girl and cried out to God, “What am I going to do?” One of our Trail Life troops stepped in to help and immediately the fifteen year old boy went out on an extended hike with the troop.
He told his mother, “On the first day, I thought I was going to die. On the second day, I barely made it to camp. By the third day, I was sure they’d have to leave me behind. And the fourth day, I saw the peak. Finally mom on the fifth day, I stood on the peak of that mountain and I realized I can do hard things.”
That is pure gold for a single mom who is walking her sons through hard things. So many times we interrupt a process of difficulties. We rescue kids rather than letting them experience the challenges – the kinds of things like working hard, the sweating and the dirt of engaged rough living. Those sorts of lessons are exactly what create the type of winning and focused men we can point to who have done amazing things.
THE POWERFUL LESSONS BOYS WANT TO LEARN
Boys suffer in society today. The suicide rate, the dropout rate — boys are really taking a beating in our culture. It’s like boyhood is some social disease that needs to be eradicated. We feel an organization like Trail Life is important because it is reaffirming the wonder of boys.
They are challenged because they don’t fall right inline with sit still, be quiet and pay attention. Boys enjoy an environment that has risks and competition involved. We’re missing a lot of that in our “everybody gets a trophy” culture.
They play video games because they get risk there: Points, levels, they progress, its hierarchal and it shows how good they are. They embrace that kind of environment because in real life they don’t get many opportunities to try their best. So we give them a robust rewards program.
Boys are driven by motion. They need to be able to move. Boys know that intuitively. You look in a classroom and boys are fidgeting. A lead medical scientist at Harvard says that boys have to move for their brain to be engaged.
In Trail Life we recognize that boys need that kind of movement. That’s why they’re engaging so strongly because they’re finding in this outdoor world the same sort of challenges and opportunities that they found in that virtual world. A lot of young boys are waking up to the outdoors and to their strengths.
It’s the failures that help perfect us. [As a society] We’re creating a generation of unproductive narcissists. We haven’t asked them to do anything and they haven’t had a chance to fail. They graduate from college and they don’t know what to do. They need to know they can fail, learn, try harder and recover. Those are the powerful lessons boys are learning in Trail Life USA.
FAITHFUL SERVICE FEELS GOOD
One of our primary values is SERVICE. When boys can learn to give to their community [by simply raking leaves in a yard or volunteering as a team for clean-up after a natural disaster] that’s a habit they carry for a lifetime. The boys do fifteen to twenty hours of service projects per year. Service is stressed throughout Trail Life because it is a Christian principle. It’s part of giving back to a community. It’s part of the boys learning their value. They feel good about it.
Boys get painted with a broad brush of “toxic masculinity”. It brings joy to them when they can do something good for their community. That helps them to remove that label.
[Faith as a core component of service] is like carrot cake. The carrot is in every bite. That’s how service and Christ-likeness are infused. The values are reinforced in them and they see how important the Christian values are to society. We have for example a Family-Man badge that reinforces the role of the dad in the family. We’re teaching godly leadership and servanthood in the household, workplace and everything.
FOR CHRISTIAN BOYS ONLY — NOT!!!
Boys of any faith or no faith at all are welcome to join Trail Life USA. We have boys of all walks of life. The parents want them to have an excellent experience where their character and leadership are growing.
There was a boy in a troop who was a little bit difficult. The leaders had trouble helping him behave. The troop master got a phone call from the boy’s mother, “Tommy is praying at home.” The troop master asked, “OK, is there a problem with that?” She replied, “We don’t pray at our house. But – we want to. We see the change in Tommy and my husband and I want to learn how to pray.”
That is where we find God. As God’s grace overcomes the mess and brings order to a young boy who doesn’t know where he is in life – the idea of a healthy boyhood growing into a healthy manhood is being restored.
Trail Life USA lets boys be boys – that means getting dirty – down right filthy sometimes.
It’s important when you think about finding ways for your family to be fit physically and spiritually that you pursue having fun and fellowship TOGETHER. That means there is a better way than everybody doing their own thing separately. Family fitness nurtures intergenerational exchange, sibling cooperation, parental listening and leadership, and a maturing for everyone in God’s grace.
June/July 2020
This Trail Life USA feature appears in the June/July 2020 issue of Faith & Fitness Magazine. Go to these other issues of the magazine for more content on family and intergenerational fitness and the role of God’s grace in your pursuit of a fit lifestyle.
April/May 2020
February/March 2019
