TWU Girls Volleyball 2026 · Sept 11–13

At a glance

A two-night, six-meal weekend for roughly 25 people. Costed from a real 28-person weekend run at the same two cabins in August 2026, so these are actual numbers rather than estimates.

~25

people

athletes + coaching staff

$133

per person, all in

six meals, two nights, boat and cleaning

beds available

26 athletes + 19 staff at full stretch

You have far more room than you need. The two cabins sleep 45 between them; you're bringing 25. That means nobody is on a floor unless they want to be, the living-room spots can stay empty, and the mattress and bedding list below can be cut back hard. Assign the beds first, then buy only what's left short.

Sleeping

Athletes in Ryan & Tracey's, staff in Shawn & Nicole's. Keeping the two groups in separate houses is the single best decision in this plan — it gives the staff a quiet place to sleep and the athletes a house of their own.

Ryan & Tracey's — athletes, up to 26

Room	Sleeps	Air mattresses	Bedding sets
Master 1	4	2 needed	2
Master 2	4	1 needed	1
Queen	3	1 needed	1
Upper King	4	—	2
Bunk Room	8	2 needed	2
Living room — couch & floor	3	floor pads	3
Capacity	26	6 + floor pads	11

Shawn & Nicole's — coaching staff, up to 19

Room	Sleeps	Notes
Master 1	2	King bed
Master 2	2	King bed
Master 1 bunk room	2	2 beds
Master 2 bunk room	2	2 beds
Pool bunk room	3	3 beds
Suite bunk room	4	4 beds
Upper couch	2	bedding needed
Living room couches	2	bedding needed
Capacity	19

The gap is 6 air mattresses and up to 15 bedding sets. That's a real cost and a real carload if the cabins have to supply it. See below — for a team trip there's a much easier answer.

What everyone brings

Every athlete brings a sleeping bag, a pillow and a towel. That one line removes 11 bedding sets from the shopping list and roughly $400–600 of linen from the budget. It's completely normal for a team trip, it means nobody is washing 26 sets of sheets afterward, and it makes the couch and floor spots perfectly comfortable instead of a problem. Only the air mattresses stay on the list — 6 of them, plus a couple of foam pads for the living-room floor.

Everyone

Sleeping bag, pillow, and two towels — one for showers, one for the lake
Swimsuit — and warm clothes. Mid-September at the lake is not August: expect daytime highs in the high teens and overnight lows near single digits. Hoodie, long pants, and a jacket.
Water bottle, sunscreen, bug spray
Runners and a pair of sandals — the road in is gravel
Any medication you need, plus your own snacks if you're particular

Good to know before you leave

There is no cell service for the last stretch of road or at the cabins. Both houses have Wi-Fi, but tell your family they won't reach you by phone.
Download your directions before Barriere. Screenshots, not a live map.
Last groceries and last fuel are in the town of Barriere, about 25 km out.
Both cabins have outdoor gas fireplaces, and by mid-September the fire ban is usually lifted — worth checking, because an evening fire matters a lot more in September than in August.

Meals

Six meals, Friday dinner through Sunday lunch. Breakfast at 9:00 and dinner at 5:30 keeps the day open for the lake. R = Ryan & Tracey's kitchen, S = Shawn & Nicole's.

Meal	Time	Menu	At	All-in
Friday, Sept 11
Dinner	5:30 pm	Lasagna, garlic bread, Caesar salad — makes ahead, feeds a crowd, survives people arriving late	R	$27
Saturday, Sept 12
Breakfast	9:00 am	Croissant breakfast sandwiches — egg, cheese, ham — plus a fruit plate and yogurt	R	$19
Lunch	noon onward	Open sandwich bar — deli meat, cheese, buns, condiments, chips, fruit. Out on the counter, eat between swims. Not a sit-down meal.	R	$18
Dinner	5:30 pm	Brisket — smoked all day, with baked beans, potato salad, corn on the cob and dinner buns · dessert	R	$34
Sunday, Sept 13
Breakfast	9:00 am	Breakfast hash — chopped brisket browned into hash browns with onion and pepper, eggs, toast, fruit	R	$18
Lunch	packed by 11:00	Sandwiches to go — built and bagged before anyone loads a car, plus fruit, chips and cookies for the road	R	$17
Per person				$133

The brisket is the spine of the weekend and it has to go on early. Two packers of about 12 lb each, on the smoker by 5:00 am Saturday, off around 3:00 pm to rest, sliced at 5:00. Somebody has to own that — it is a genuine all-day job and it cannot be improvised at 2:00 pm. Pull a reserve aside before it goes to the table: about 2 lb of chopped brisket set into the fridge is what makes Sunday's hash work. Every year someone forgets this step and Sunday morning becomes plain hash browns.

Feed them more than you think. These are 18-to-22-year-old varsity athletes who will spend the day swimming and playing beach volleyball. The per-person food costs above already carry a 15% uplift over what the same six meals cost a mixed family group of the same size — and that may still be light on breakfast. Buy extra bread, extra eggs, extra fruit, and keep a snack shelf stocked all weekend.

Budget

Each meal carries its own food cost plus a flat $9.25 per person toward the things that aren't food. Six meals × 25 people = 150 person-meals.

Food, per person

Friday dinner — lasagna	$18
Sat breakfast — croissant sandwiches	$10
Sat lunch — sandwich bar	$9
Sat dinner — brisket	$25
Sun breakfast — hash	$9
Sun lunch — sandwiches to go	$8
Food per person	$79

Includes a 15% athlete-appetite uplift on the family-weekend actuals.

Shared costs

Paper & supplies	$475
Cabin cleaning, both houses	$500
Boat gas — one boat	$250
Propane	$100
Garbage run to the dump	$50
Pool	$1,375

$9.17 per person-meal, charged at $9.25. Both cabins are provided at no charge — there is no accommodation cost in this budget.

Line	Amount
Food — 25 people × $79	$1,975
Shared costs	$1,375
Weekend total	$3,350
Per person	$133

Not in this budget. Six air mattresses if the cabins have to supply them (about $250–400 new, or borrowed for free). Bedding, if athletes don't bring sleeping bags — $400–600. And nothing for travel: it's about five hours each way from the Fraser Valley, so carpool fuel is on whoever drives unless you decide to pool it. A $150 per person charge covers the $133 with a real cushion and gives you room for mattresses and a contingency without going back to anyone for more.

Shopping

One big Costco run on the way up, split into two carts — one for each cabin's kitchen — plus a top-up in Barriere. Nothing here comes from anyone's home pantry, so it all has to be bought.

The big items

2 beef briskets, about 12 lb each — ask for the smaller end of the case so they cook evenly
Lasagnas — 3 large trays for 25, plus garlic bread and Caesar kits
Croissants — 3 dozen, plus sliced ham, eggs, cheese slices
Deli meat and cheese for two sandwich meals — buy by weight, not by tray. Plan 150 g of meat and 50 g of cheese per person per sandwich meal: for 25 people across two meals that's about 7.5 kg of deli meat and 2.5 kg of cheese. Plus buns and sliced bread.
Sides for the brisket — baked beans, potato salad, corn on the cob, dinner buns
Hash — diced hash browns, onions, peppers, eggs, shredded cheese
Fruit — melon, grapes, bananas, berries. Buy twice what feels right.
Snack shelf — chips, salsa, cookies, granola bars, ice cream bars. Keep it stocked all weekend.
Drinks — milk (about 3 × 4 L jugs), two large bottles of orange juice, not six, and coffee: one box of K-Cups plus ground coffee for four 40-cup urns across the two big breakfast mornings. Athletes drink water — put out jugs with ice and lemon rather than buying pop.
Watermelon — 2, not 3. Two covers the Saturday fruit plate and afternoon snacking.

Paper & supplies — buy to a ratio

Paper plates — 180 (1.2 per person-meal)
Paper bowls — 60
Cutlery — 300
Cold cups — 225, and a marker so people label their own
Napkins — 450
Toilet paper, paper towel, garbage bags, ziplocs, foil, dish soap — buy the bulk packs. Anything left over goes into cabin stock and gets used. Running short mid-weekend with 25 people is a genuine problem.
6 large foil pans — brisket, and holding sides warm

These ratios come from a 28-person weekend at the same cabins where plates and bowls were bought at roughly double what actually got used.

Where over-buying happens. On the family weekend at these same cabins, every single over-buy was a drink or a cold cut — milk, orange juice, deli meat, cheese, watermelon. Nothing cooked and nothing paper was over-bought. Pad the cooked meat and the paper goods; buy drinks and cold cuts tight and make a run to AG Foods in Barriere if you're wrong. It's an hour round trip, against a fridge you drive home full.

Collect dietary requirements before you shop, not after you arrive. With 25 people you will almost certainly have at least one nut allergy, one vegetarian, and one gluten intolerance. On a team this matters more than at a family gathering, because nobody in the kitchen knows everyone's history. Ask on the signup, keep any peanut products labelled and on their own shelf, and have a vegetarian option at both dinners — lasagna is easy to do as one veggie tray, and a brisket dinner needs a plan.

Jobs

Twenty-plus athletes is a lot of hands. The only thing that goes wrong is nobody knowing whose turn it is.

Post the roster on the fridge before anyone arrives. Two cooks and three on cleanup per meal, names written down. Cooks don't clean — that rule keeps it fair and it keeps the kitchen moving.
The brisket needs one named owner for Saturday, on at 5:00 am. Realistically that's a coach or a host, not an athlete.
Sunday's packed lunches get built by a line of six people in twenty minutes while everyone else strips beds and loads cars.
Last hour Sunday: everyone strips their own bed, wipes their own space, and takes a job. Cleaners come in afterward, but the difference between a tidy handover and a wrecked one is one hour of 25 people versus an afternoon of two.

Water & safety

This is the part that actually matters. Twenty young adults, a mountain lake, one boat, and no cell service. Decide these before you go, not on the dock.

September water is colder than it looks. East Barriere is a deep mountain lake and by mid-September the surface has started dropping while the air can still feel warm. Cold-water shock is the real risk, not distance. Nobody swims alone, everyone on the boat wears a PFD, and if the girls are tubing or wakeboarding keep the sessions short and get people into dry clothes straight after.

One named boat driver per outing, sober, and a passenger count that doesn't move. Everyone on the boat wears a PFD — count the PFDs before the first trip, not during it.
No swimming alone and no swimming after dark. East Barriere is a cold, deep mountain lake; it does not warm up the way people expect and cold shock is the real risk, not distance.
Know your nearest help. No cell service at the cabins — the nearest reliable signal and the nearest medical care are both back toward Barriere, roughly 25 km of gravel and winding road. Bring a real first aid kit and know who's driving if someone needs to go.
Emergency plan on the fridge: cabin addresses, the drive-out route, and who has a vehicle with fuel in it. Write it down; phones won't help.
Institutional paperwork. If this is a TWU-sanctioned team activity, athletics will almost certainly need waivers, an emergency contact list, medical and allergy information, and a staff-to-athlete ratio on file. Start that early — it takes longer than the meal plan.

To decide

Confirmed: Friday Sept 11 → Sunday Sept 13, 2026. Mid-September at 700 m elevation is a different weekend than August — see the weather note under “What everyone brings”.
The actual split — how many athletes, how many staff. The plan assumes about 25 total and the houses hold 45, so this only affects the shopping quantities.
Who pays — athletes individually, the team budget, or a split. That decides whether you charge $133 a head or absorb it centrally, and it changes how carefully the receipts need tracking.
Sleeping bags or linens. Sleeping bags save $400–600 and a mountain of laundry. It only needs to be on the packing list.
Air mattresses — buy, borrow, or ask athletes to bring their own camping pads.
Who owns the brisket. Name that person now.
Vegetarian and allergy plan for both dinners.