I am back from the SCS Youth National Championships in Ann Arbor, MI. The event was an enjoyable experience. You can check out the results here. In no particular order here are some random thoughts on the weekend:
- I know our kids probably were hoping to climb better than they did. It is easy to be disappointed, but hopefully they saw all the positives in getting as far as they did.
- One of the kids did make it on the national team for speed climbing despite the fact that we don’t really take speed climbing all that seriously. Still a cool thing for her to accomplish.
- I recognized Carlo Traversi in the audience from the pictures of him sending Whispers of Wisdom on Ryan Olson’s blog. Turns out he was there to watch his brother Giovanni compete. Unfortunately Giovanni inadvertently skipped the first clip on his semi-final route and the judges waited too long to start telling him to clip. This was compounded by the needlessly loud techno being pumped through the gym and he never heard the calls to clip the first draw until after he clipped the 3rd draw. He was more or less called off and he was pretty pissed off about things. I think that if he had been more level headed he might have been able to get some sort of technical called.
- Speaking of recognizable climbers, I also saw Obe Carrion, the SoIll guys, Matt Segal and Mike Moelter as well. Mike does a really nice job manning the mic.
- Overall the comp was really well run and they did a great job keeping thing running on time…except for the usual problems getting the speed climbing portion of things done any where close to on time
- The routes looked really fun and not jacked which is always good
- It was obscenely hot in the gym on Sunday and just regular hot on Friday and Saturday
- It was very cool to see Tyler Haack as national champion for the junior males…well deserved…although I think Future Roden could have won if he had not overextended himself skipping a couple of holds near the end of the route.
- Kids these days are strong strong strong…
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