Words Pamela Martin
Photos Wind Gypsy Photography
School break planning has a way of sneaking up on you.
One minute it’s February and the next you’re staring down a browser with 10 tabs open, a stack of rec centre brochures covered in scribbles, and a half-remembered text from another parent about some camp your kid absolutely has to attend. If that sounds familiar, two Saanich Peninsula dads have built something just for you.
Craig Frew and Michael Doyle are the founders of CampMatch, a free, centralized platform that helps families search, compare, and plan youth camps and programs. The idea was born during a holiday conversation about an upcoming ski trip that somehow turned into a shared venting session about the chaos of camp planning.
“A flash went through my head of sitting there with countless pieces of paper, scribbled dates trying to work around family visits and holidays, brochures from rec centres with scribbles all over them, searching for a text from another parent raving about some camp,” Craig recalls. “It was a genuinely chaotic process.” When Michael suggested they just build something, Craig didn’t need much convincing.
The platform they created is refreshingly straightforward. Parents don’t need to create an account to start browsing. Enter your child’s age and address, and CampMatch surfaces available camps nearby filtered by interest and category. A visual planner dashboard lets you map out the whole season, and you can share your plan with other families, finally solving the endless group-text problem of figuring out which camps your kids’ friends are attending. Lessons, leagues and Pro-D programs are also featured.
What started as a local solution has grown faster than either founder anticipated. CampMatch now lists over 17,000 camps and programs across Canada, with a particularly strong presence in Victoria, Vancouver and the GTA. Local providers are already on the platform, including North Saanich Yacht Club, McTavish Academy of Art, and Sneaky Education, among many others. Growth has been largely word of mouth, the best possible kind.
“We started overhearing parents telling other parents about CampMatch,” Craig says. “And then someone recommended that we check out the site, not knowing we’d built it. You can’t manufacture that.”
The founders, whose wives are as much a part of the success, are stay-at-home dads first, running CampMatch from school pickups, naptime windows, and late nights once the kids are in bed. Their daily business meetings happen in the Keating Elementary parking lot. It’s a setup that keeps them grounded in exactly the problem they set out to solve, and it shows in how they talk about the platform’s future.
Monetization is being done thoughtfully to benefit both parents and providers. Craig is direct about that: “We will never ask parents to pay to use the platform, while providers are offered premium accounts to help target their marketing dollars. ” What is on the horizon is something arguably more meaningful, a nonprofit arm called CampMatch Kids Society, designed to help lower-income families access camps they otherwise couldn’t afford. Camp providers have already pledged free spots and significant discounts, and
the founders are working toward a launch for the 2026 spring season.
“The goal is simple,” Craig says. “To help lower-income families afford summer camps for their kids. It feels like a natural extension of why we built this in the first place.”
For Saanich Peninsula families heading into summer planning mode, CampMatch is worth a look. For any local camp operators not yet listed, the founders have a clear message: your families are already there looking for you, and it costs nothing to be found.
Visit www.campmatch.ca to start planning.
