Things to Do in Summit

While working with players ranging from toddlers to high-schoolers, the professional coaches at U.K. Elite Soccer, Inc. incorporate individual training and team-focused programs to create well-rounded athletes both on and off the pitch. Their game-based approach to teaching helps younger students learn motor skills, social skills, and coordination, and gives older students the chance to learn how to dribble in Morse code. The instructors also incorporate methods from football clubs around the world, borrowing tricks from footballers in England, Brazil, the USA, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany to augment training courses. Programs run throughout the year, allowing players and coaches to focus on continual development no matter the season.

During Hollywood's Golden Age, The Community Theatre was the crowning achievement of Walter Reade's chain of New Jersey movie palaces. By the 1980s, after five decades of movie screenings and catastrophic popcorn wars, the theater sat in disrepair. Concerned citizens banded together in 1994 to save the historic building from a sad end, and in May 2011, after a series of renovations, the theater officially changed its name to the Mayo Performing Arts Center. The venue currently hosts more than 200 performances a year, occasional art showings, and performance-arts education classes for adults and children.

BAM Social Sports assembles co-ed teams of athletes aged 21 and older for regular battle in recreational games throughout northern and central New Jersey. The network's friendship-fueled leagues span a wide range of sports, including basketball, soccer, softball, and bowling, and excluding hamster racing. After games, players can retire to local sponsor bars, where discounts on food and drink help celebrate victories or fuel mournful food fights.

One of the nation's most esteemed Shakespeare outfits, the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey has brought the playwright's work to life for the past half-century. But the troupe takes its name more as an inspiration than a strict limit, also mounting productions of other classics by writers such as Thornton Wilder and Noël Coward. Once a summer, the company takes to the College of Saint Elizabeth's outdoor amphitheater—modeled after Athens' Theater of Dionysius, a favorite venue for Shakespeare performances in Greece—to present the bard's work in the way he intended: alive under the open sky.

Helmed by a team of passionate climbing coaches, both of The Gravity Vault's locations surround climbers with more than 13,000 square feet of climbing space. Walls tower past 35 feet, mimicking such natural rock formations as overhangs, keyhole arches, and slabs, and bouldering areas challenge climbers with a latticework of problems that—unlike most of life's—can't simply be solved with dynamite and a pair of roller skates. Visitors can choose from up to 60 top-rope stations, trusting either the trained staff or a certified fellow climber to man the ropes while they scramble to the summit. When not dangling from a hold or saving lost kittens from a rappel ledge, members can bulk up in the cardiovascular-training area.

The organizers of Garden State BrewFest invite beer lovers to sample the ales and lagers of tri-state-area brewers in the name of charity. After collecting donations of canned food for the Community FoodBank of New Jersey, gate attendants usher visitors in to taste two-ounce samples, each freshly poured by representatives from breweries such as Philadelphia’s Yards Brewing Company and Cape May County’s Tuckahoe Brewing Company. An array of entertainment engages guests throughout the four-hour fete, including live bands, a beer-pong tournament, and a keg-icing contest. Their Homebrew Competition lets DIY brewers enter their best fall-season beers, and the grand-prize winner gets to work alongside master brewer Brendan O’Neil of New Jersey Beer Co. Brewery for a day. Garden State BrewFest’s team donates a portion of the proceeds to St. Jude Children's Hospital.