Aliyya Swaby Photo
Halfway up a 25-foot wall, Ted Brooks felt his hamstring tighten and cramp. He pushed through the pain and pulled himself up the rest of the distance.
Then he rappelled down, massaged out the kink and immediately started back up again.
He and three other Common Ground High School students met up for their regular Monday night indoor rock climbing practice session at City Climb Gym just off of Winchester Avenue. One of the day’s challenges: “double doubles” and “triple triples.”
Attached to a belay rope and partner on the ground for safety, each student had to make his way up the same difficult route two and then three times in a row, with just enough time in between to shake out aching forearms and thigh muscles.
As rock climbing moves indoors and expands beyond its traditionally white, well-off base, local kids in New Haven are heading to Newhallville’s City Climb Gym to be a part of the action.
The gym’s staff still has work to do to capture the many kids still deterred by the sport’s perceived narrow cultural appeal and steep start-up cost.
Crystal Tananyki, one of the gym’s founders, said she tries hard to lower the financial barriers that still dissuade many nearby kids from pulling on a harness and starting up their first climbing route.
“Nothing makes me happier than to see the neighborhood kids ride up on their bikes,” she said. When students go to the gym on school trips, City Climb staff picks out those who are “really good” and talks to their parents about offering them a free membership, she said. “Unfortunately, parental involvement is not always present.”
If parents do not go to the gym to sign the consent forms, kids cannot climb, Tananyki said. That’s where her efforts get stuck.
When they climb for fun, kids are competing against themselves, working to improve themselves, instead of against others. “You’re just a winner,” she said.
On Sight, In Mind
A junior at Common Ground, Brooks (pictured left) started climbing a few months ago, because he wanted to get over a chronic fear of heights.
Is that fear going away? “Slowly,” he said. Monday was the first day in a while he had climbed that wall. “This time I didn’t look down as much,” which helped, he said.
But Brooks feels more comfortable bouldering – maneuvering up and around a shorter 12 to 15-foot wall without a harness, rope or lead. “It allows for freedom,” he said.
The gym’s climbing routes are numbered by difficulty, from 5.5 up past 5.11. Common Ground’s youth team coach Chris Desir (pictured above right) had the boys start at 5.6 and 5.7 difficulty levels for the initial drills. The team of 13 or 14 students meets three times a week at City Climb Gym, though attendance varies by day, Desir said. The kids climb free; Common Ground pays for their gym memberships.
A newer climber, Brooks said Desir scolds him often for not looking at the pattern of the holds before climbing. “I don’t really look. It’s not until I’m on the wall that I’m wondering where to go next,” Brooks said. “I usually spend a lot of time on the wall compared to other people.”
After the drills, the boys were instructed to climb a more difficult route “on sight,” tackling a route they hadn’t done before or had any information about beforehand. “You’re going to try to do it on your first try,” Desir said to Brooks.
As a student at Dartmouth College, Desir lived in a university residence that had a rock climbing gym two stories underground. He had dabbled in other sports, including track, basketball, soccer and rugby. When his friends convinced him to start climbing at the start of his junior year, he was hooked from the start.
“It’s engaging because you’re so physically and mentally involved in the activity,” he said. “There are a lot of mental puzzles to it, but you’re solving them with your body.” After graduating from Dartmouth, he began working at Common Ground High School in February 2013, as an after-school tutor and substitute teacher. He convinced the school to let him start a rock climbing team at the beginning of the following academic year.
Climbing is traditionally “culturally and socially upper-middle-class and white,” Desir said, considered a “niche sport that not a lot of people know about.” That perception is changing as climbing becomes more physically accessible to a broader swath of urban neighbors. But the cost can still be prohibitive. A monthly membership at City Climb Gym costs $55 for adults and $45 for students.
Indoor climbing is an extension of mountaineering, a sport that requires resources, time, and access to mountains. Now that climbing gyms are proliferating throughout the country, especially in areas where there are few opportunities for outdoor climbing, a broader range of people have access to the sport. More and more high profile climbers are not white, he said.
Climbing isn’t a necessity for inner-city youth of color, Desir said. But gyms like City Climb could represent “safe spaces” in neighborhoods like Newhallville that have high rates of violence.
This year, Common Ground’s team is prepping for an outdoors climbing trip in Rumney, New Hampshire, in early May. By then, Common Ground senior Marcel Aguirre wants to learn how to “lead climb,” a riskier technique with no support from a top-rope anchored to the top of the wall. For protection in case of a fall, the lead climber clips “quickdraws” into the bolts on the multi-colored holds while climbing.
When lead climbing, “you pull out a lot of rope,” leaving a lot more slack than if your rope is anchored to the top, Desir said. “You could take a bad fall.” But outdoors, “If you say you’ve climbed a route, you’re saying you’ve led it,” he said. “Marcel has ambitions.”
Monday evening, Aguirre climbed “mock lead,” still attached to the top-rope but going through the motions of clipping into the holds. He has competed a couple of times, moving through as many difficult routes as he could to rack up points and make it to the finals.
“It feels more natural to lead on the trip. It’s a greater challenge,” said Aguirre, who has been climbing for a year and a half. “I’m always up for danger.” After making it a portion of the way up on his first try climbing mock lead Monday evening, he explained the obstacles: While holding his own weight “for friction,” he had to pull himself up sideways to reach the next hold, which was difficult with “not as good footholds.” What was his next strategy for the route? “I might be able to skip” the light blue hold “and go for the red one,” he said. “It depends on how high I can get my feet.”
“Monkeying With a Purpose”
“With gyms opening up in more and more urban environments, the average climber is no longer like me – a bearded white guy,” Matt Ferrara (pictured left) said. He leads the Rock City Crew, a group of about 15 kids between ages 11 and 18, from New Haven and neighboring towns.
The perception of who and what a climber looks like is changing. Still, some people in the neighborhood still don’t know City Climb Gym is right around the corner, he said.
A climber for the past ten years, Ferrara used to teach wilderness survival skills in the Adirondacks to a group of at-risk youth, some who were court mandated to the program from juvenile detention centers. In the mountains, “away from the drugs and money and technology,” all the kids were “on the same level,” Ferrara said. No one had any more than anyone else.
The same egalitarian spirit runs through the sport of climbing. “It doesn’t matter how fancy your gear is,” he said. Hard work determines whether you master the route.
Climbing combines the individuality of a solo sport with the camaraderie of a team sport. John Gonzalez, a sophomore at Sound School, joined the crew last month because his friend Scott Wilcox “kept talking about it at school, the fact that’s it a free zone. You don’t get judged by people….I thought it was too good to be true.”
Gonzalez is new to rock climbing, but an old hat at high-intensity obstacle training — he practices parkour, trying to get from one spot to the other in the most efficient way possible, using his surroundings for propulsion. Parkour is “somewhat similar” to climbing, though “you use more of your hands in climbing,” he said. “My arms get tired more often than my feet.”
Gonzalez said he is much calmer now that he climbs regularly. “I’m a very energetic person. It’s hard for me to focus at times. [Climbing] helps me relax a lot,” he said.
Siblings Riley and Scott Wilcox joined the team at the same time, last August. A sophomore at Sound School, Scott said his favorite bouldering route is called “Beefsteak.” He mastered it on his third try. “I like [bouldering] because you can just not think about stuff,” he said. “You don’t have to follow a specific route.” He’s learned to stay “openminded to what other people” advise him to do on a route “because they’re usually right.”
Riley, a fifth-grader at Edgewood School, said climbing is “like monkeying around with a purpose.” She enjoys cheering her teammates on to help them to finish especially difficult routes. Her favorite bouldering route is called “Hooked,” which requires climbers to situate their bodies sideways and swing without footholds. “It’s hard,” she said.
Ferrara said climbing “allows for a lot of teachable moments and lessons learned.” A student who does the bare minimum – goes to the gym for team practices, puts in a “decent” amount of effort, but almost never uses a maximum amount of strength – and sees hard-working peers swiftly “moving up in levels” will “have a moment of reflection.” That student may realize hard work correlates directly with progress and put in more effort at the gym.
“I tell the kids: do this until it’s not fun. I hope I can climb until I can’t get out of bed, until I can’t take care of myself as an individual,” Ferrara said.
He keeps at least three spots open during the year for free membership for anyone coming “from a place of hardship.” The recipients have to promise to “steadily” attend gym practices, “give it their all,” and not be a “distraction to the other kids.” All three of those positions are now filled.
Parents or guardians of students on the team can learn to belay – provide support for a climbing partner — at no cost, so they can climb with their kids. “If a parent is not a climber, they can become a climber,” he said. At least half of Rock City Crew students’ family members take advantage of that opportunity at least one time.
Getting Schools Up The Wall
JoAnne Wilcox joins her kids Riley and Scott climbing every week. And she wants to take it further — she wants a climbing team for students at alternative schools, who generally have struggled to make it through high school, because of behavioral problems, special education needs or past trauma.
“Alternative schools are often giving kids ways to tap into jobs, college, and better decisions,” she said. “Why not add fun to the list, too?” Climbing teaches students to reorient the way they think about failure. Students are given a project, a “route that’s challenging,” and find a certain place “trips you up,” she said. When they can figure out a way to “master that problem,” they keep trying until they hit another, until the the whole project is done. “Just like in life,” she said.
Larry Conaway, principal of New Light High School, said he would love to have a climbing team for students at the alternative school, but would need more resources to get it off the ground. Climbing builds students’ confidence and self-esteem, he said. When New Light was on Dixwell Avenue, instead of in Wooster Square, staff took students on a few field trips to City Climb Gym and “had a blast,” Conaway said. But to create a team, the school would need money, a team coach, and a way to build it into the schedule.
He said administrators might consider it for the next academic year, though their first priority now is making sure their 16 “over-age, under-credited, high risk” seniors make it through graduation. “They’re dealing with their journey in life,” he said. “There’s been obstacles.”
The gym’s owner is thinking even bigger. Tananyki wants to have every local high school form a climbing team as a “good alternative to team sports.” She and her staff have sent fliers to the schools and are working on a “better game plan” for getting the word out.
“It’s an up-and-coming sport where a lot of college kids know about it,” but not necessarily older administrators, she said.
The oldest, and newest, student on Rock City Crew is 18-year-old Hillhouse senior Immanuel Chatman. He’s an athlete — he runs track, swims and bikes on his own. Climbing is a “stress reliever,” helping him to “build muscle. When I find myself actually achieving something, it makes me feel accomplished,” he said.
Chatman lives two and a half blocks away from City Climb, in Newhallville. “I don’t know many people who come here who live in my neighborhood,” he said, but he also does not interact with many of his neighbors. “I stay to myself and do things that interest me.”
He always knew the gym was around the corner but never had enough time to go regularly. Next year, he will be studying “computer-aided drafting” at Gateway Community College and is considering going into the Army Reserves afterward. So “staying in shape” is key, he said.
Last Monday evening, Chatman studied the “Hooked” bouldering route, as the younger kids in Rock City Crew dangled off the holds. He grasped the blue hold underlined by three rays of green tape and reached around the corner for the following hold. Realizing too late there were no footholds mid-route, he fell off onto the soft padding, stepped back, studied the path again.
Several minutes later, the other kids cheered him on as he headed back to “Hooked.” This time, he made it further, swinging past the middle portion and reaching out for another hold without any foot support. But he fell again.
“So close!” his teammate Gonzalez said.
“Yeah,” Chatman replied, and he stood back to study the route again.