MONACA - The last 20 minutes of each day at Circus Camp are what they call "show off."

And it's exactly what it sounds like, a chance for each of the 28 kids to show off their favorite trick, with circus music blaring and the other 27 kids forming an appreciative audience.

One week into the two-week camp, most of the tricks are fairly basic. A number of kids mount one of the globes, hard plastic balls about two feet tall, and balance there using quick little steps while spinning rings on their arms. A few others show juggling skills in various degrees of development. A couple of girls play with devil sticks, using a stick in each hand to flip a third in the air.

Then Brett Barber scampers to a corner of the Penn State-Beaver gymnasium and returns with a jump rope. The 11-year-old hops catlike on the globe, balances for a moment, then starts jumping rope - once, twice, three times before he falls.

Instructor Bob Good just turns away, laughing and shaking his head. The youngster from Frederick, Md., who is staying with cousins in Monaca, is a bit of a phenom. Besides treating the rolling globe like a sidewalk, he mastered basic juggling in a day and can do a stacked rola bola, balancing on a board atop two blocks atop another board rolling on an oversize can.

The camp celebrated its two-week run with a public performance last week.

Ask Good, a circus pro from Eastern Pennsylvania, about his favorite moment during the first week, and the answer is not about Brett.

Nor is it about Brandon Thompson, an 11-year-old from Center who can balance a 10-foot pole on his chin.

Nor is it about Sarah Evans, an 11-year-old from Hazelwood who can hop from one rolling globe onto another.

"It was when that big girl got on the ball," Good said. "It took her four days, and when she finally got it, I just went over and hugged her. It was like a light bulb went off."

The girl he referred to was Mariah Martin, 14, of Monaca, who is about 6 feet tall, looming over the other children and even over the diminutive Good and fellow instructor Pat Ferri of New York State.

"I couldn't get on that ball," she said of the rolling globe, grinning and saying it "felt really good" when she finally mastered it.

"It builds a lot of self-confidence," Good said. "They learn to do things they thought they couldn't do. They came in here thinking, 'Man, I could never stand on the globe,' and now they can all stand on the globe."

And building confidence, coordination and balance are the real goals of the circus camp, along with having fun.

"It's not the same group you're going to find in soccer camp," said Ferri, himself a veteran of youth wrestling camps. "You're not trying to beat anybody."

Ferri acknowledged that performers do get competitive at higher levels - "it becomes a numbers game, especially in juggling," he said - but that the real challenge comes in mastering new tricks, learning new equipment and finding ways to entertain people.

"This is the circus, and you can't lose that element of fun," he said. "Essentially, this is all about doing silly things."

And even at the end of a five-hour day at the end of a five-day week, the kids were still busy and attentive, lining up to take their turns. Sarah Evans' mother had to practically drag her off a rolling globe to take her home 15 minutes after the classes ended.

"No matter how hard we work them, they don't go home grumbling," Ferri said.

Ferri, who describes himself as a "physical comic," does two or three circus camps a year and performs in events near his home along the New York/Massachusetts border, but pays his bills as a carpenter and by restoring furniture.

Good, a retired teacher, also performs near his home, specializing in a hand-balancing act. His great accomplishment was mastering a one-armed handstand on top of a cane.

"I spent a year working an hour a day to learn that," he said. "You've got to be a little nuts."

Good and Ferri worked together at a circus camp at Berkshire Community College in Massachusetts. A former Berkshire employee now working for Penn State Beaver suggested that the college host a camp.

John Augustine, of Sewickley, who works with the Quaker Valley Juggling Club,

said the kids were not the only ones inspired by the camp. He said he stayed late one day to master the stacked rola bola, not wanting to be bested by an 11-year-old, and another day to balance the 10-foot pole on his chin, for the same reason.

"You see them do something you can't do. It's pretty impressive," he said.