Adult Bouldering League - Season 4 Recap

With the last season being roughly 5 years ago, members in The Boulder Field community were ready for something new. You could think of the program as a structured session with old and new friends, paired with friendly competition. Previous staff and current management laid a great foundation for how we run the league. The program is ingrained with the idea of building our community. We meet two days per week for 2 hours a day, all together, training and competing and having fun all together. It’s a great opportunity to meet new friends, and be a part of an awesome group of climbers of all skill levels. Our core principles of the league: Fun, motivation, and respect! These 3 words helped usher us into having a great comeback season! We combined a few new concepts with the old ones set in place during previous seasons.

When the opportunity to host the program was presented to me, I was immediately excited to set a new tone for the culture around ABL. I knew that I wanted our participants to have a fun and memorable experience while also progressing in climbing. For starters, during our group dynamic stretching, we had volunteers come up and help me lead stretches. This gave competitors the chance to get the jitters out before they even got on the wall. Not everyone is used to speaking in front of large groups, so it was a nice icebreaker for people to get out of their comfort zone. (Sometimes when you’re climbing, you have to get out of your comfort zone as well!) During warm ups and briefings, my goal was to ensure that competitors were hyped to train and compete.

“The biggest thing that stood out to me was the team building during the warm up.

It helped to build the community. It was the little things like yelling a motto every session and

the fun group warm ups we did. Having people help lead warm ups was great. Repeating each

warm up out loud when Lukas said it made us all feel like one big team. Even though we were

competing against each other, we felt like one big team and it was all friendly.” - Diego Lopez

Once we were finished with our warm ups and daily briefings, we always had one important step before splitting up:

If you’ve ever been at TBF during one of our sessions, you’ve surely noticed our group motto chants. These were a fun way for all of us to be silly, and get each other pumped up! A few examples: (- Training Day, Silence the Doubts! - ABL, Sensational Slab Sendage! - Scrimmage Day, Seize the moment!) These mottos helped us stay grounded and gave us that extra edge during training and competition.

On the Orientation Day, Once all the teams were formed, I thought it’d be fun for everyone to introduce their teams and get the whole League to chant it outloud to get each team hyped up and encouraged! Some favorite team names from last season were the Slimmin Jimmies, Rock Huggers, and the Counterfeit Chameleons!

For Training Days, I would often join competitors in the workouts I assigned to them, because no good leader can tell someone what to do without actually doing it themselves! (Lead by example). One example of a great training day was when we paired a circuit climbing session with calisthenics training. Another was 4x4’s paired with Core training.

“It was the most fun I’ve had in my two years of climbing. I saw a lot of people

improve a lot in just a small amount of time. It was a great community setting, it was fun to train

together and make friends.” - Ethan Huang

Scrimmage days are where we put all that good training to use! You could think about training day as practice, and scrimmage day as gameday, where we execute! Only 4 sections in the gym are available for scrimmage. For each week, the 4 walls are either all slab/vertical, or all overhanging. This gives climbers an opportunity to work on their strengths and weaknesses, and encourages them to try all of the routes in the gym at some point. Each competitor gets their own scorecard, and their top 5 climbs are logged. Points are given based on our par system, which is based on progression, not simply raw climbing ability. Competitors are given about 90 minutes to scrimmage, so every attempt counts!

“It was a fun experience to climb a bunch of routes I normally wouldn’t come

back to. I got to refine my skills on boulders I already sent. Climbing with my team and having a

cheer squad was really fun!” - Esra Senvardarli

After an awesome 6 weeks of training and competing together, Finals Day arrived. We had our final scrimmage, a raffle, and the award ceremony. At the end, everyone took a group photo with their ABL T-Shirts. (Those things are exclusive, Only 32 made!) By the end of the league, I felt like I could call all 32 competitors my friends. The enthusiasm and effort put forth by all of the competitors was what made this season special. I want to give one more thank you to everyone who joined. Hosting ABL is one of the most rewarding and enjoyable things I’ve done since working at TBF.

- Lukas Hall

“The league was an absolute blast! My favorite part was the community,

everyone wanted for each other to succeed, we all cheered for each other even though we just

met. It was also fun to share beta with other competitors, even if they were on a different team.” - Maxim Korablev