NEW WASHINGTON — Summertime is traditionally when young basketball players work to get better for the next season.

If getting better is the goal, few places will help them do so like the 419 Next Level Basketball Skills Camp that concluded on Thursday at Buckeye Central High School.

Coordinated by Willard boys’ head basketball coach Joe Bedingfield and Colonel Crawford varsity assistant Nate Hill, instruction is offered to boys and girls entering grades 5-12.

The camp lasts three days — this year July 12-14 — for two hours each day. There are 10 stations that all players rotate through, with two coaches at each station.

“There’s not a lot of standing around. It’s two hours of getting after it,” Hill said. “We’ve done longer ones (in past years), but we’ve found out keep it at two hours for the attention span.”

The camp began in 2010 as a post and perimeter camp for high school boys at Willard High School. The next year girls were invited.

“We had it at Bucyrus for two years, then it went away,” Hill said. “It came back, and we expanded it to include elementary students.”

“Buckeye Central is the best place (to hold it) because of the facilities,” Bedingfield said. “The facilities are great.”

The facilities include not only varsity and middle school gyms, but two auxiliary gyms and a multipurpose room. There was also a station on an outdoor court.

“We’ve been at Buckeye Central for six or seven years,” Hill said. “The nice thing is all the different coaches around the area that help out.”

The list reads like a Who’s Who in basketball coaches in the area. Besides Bedingfield and Hill, former head coach Dave Hirschy, Ontario’s Joe Balogh, Wynford’s Tim Ehresman, David Sheldon of Colonel Crawford, current boys’ head coach Tom Howell, girls’ coach Abram Kaple, and former coach Phil Loy of Buckeye Central, Wynford’s Steve Mohr, and South Central’s Brett Seidel, among others.

“The amount of wins that have gone through this camp is insane,” Hill said.

“All the different coaches, all the different voices — and if (the campers) don’t remember everything, they can go back and watch it,” Bedingfield said. “In the old days, we used DVDs and handed them out. Now we have YouTube, we send it out on e-mail and it’s much easier.”

There were 140 kids at this year’s event. Bedingfield noted that the largest groups of players were from grades six through nine. With all the accumulated basketball knowledge that was being shared, the $80 price tag — which included a camp T-shirt — seemed like a bargain.

“You can’t find a camp like ours,” Bedingfield said. “Not for the price, not for the amount of coaches, and not for the amount that we give you.”

There are many things that Bedingfield, Hill, Hirschy and the other coaches could be doing instead of planning and holding a skills camp. But it is a labor of love.

“We like basketball. We like the camaraderie of the coaches,” Bedingfield said. “We love talking basketball and that’s what we do.”