The Short Beta series on CBJ helps youth coaches support the core clientele of a competitive youth program: the climbers on the team and their parents. Originally published on Jason Chang’s The Short Beta website, the essays in this series cover myriad topics that are relevant to youth climbers and their families, from the non-physical side of climbing to redpoint/onsite comp formats and isolation. We encourage you to read, print and share these resources with your team; all we ask is that you give proper credit when doing so.
Intro by Naomi Stevens
In the latest segment of this multi-part series, the authors encourage parents, guardians and unscheduled coaches to volunteer. Climbing is becoming more popular, competitions are busier, and volunteering remains essential for many competitions to take place. And while the authors admit that for non-climbers volunteering can be daunting, there are always volunteering roles that require little to no climbing experience or skills. If you already plan to attend a youth competition in the future, please consider volunteering for the event! The current USA Climbing youth competition season may be coming to a close, but there’s always next year. Coaches, feel free to share the three-part text below with team parents. It might just be the thing that motivates them to help out!
You Need to Volunteer (Don’t Worry, They’ll Find You A Job Where You Can’t Break Anything)
Authored by Kevin Gallagher, Jason Chang and the New England East RC team
[Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article was first published on The Short Beta website in 2019.]
Our sport requires a lot of volunteers. I know if you’re a non-climber, it can be very intimidating to raise your hand in order to help out at a local competition—and even more so at Regionals and beyond. As someone who has judged at the National level, I have to say that despite the pressure to get things right, it sure is a lot of fun to get involved.
Regional comps and others need a lot of volunteers to keep things running safely and efficiently. Here are many of the positions that are required:
Training required volunteer positions (high quality necessary to ensure youth safety and fair competition)
- Lead belayer
- Top rope belayer
- Speed climbing safety monitor
- Judge (typically trained prior or on the spot)
- Assistant Judge (typically trained prior or on the spot)
- Scoring
No training volunteer positions (aka don’t worry, you wont mess anything up)
- Runner (coordinates the movement of climbers from place to place)
- Scorecard runner (runs…scorecards)
- Iso monitor (monitors…isolation)
- Iso check-in
It’s getting harder each year to get the people we need to run comps. Ironically, in my region, as the number of competitors has gone up, the number of volunteers has gone down.
— Kevin Gallagher
And of course, our super stars, the RCs who do gym venue coordination, web updates, social media, judging, volunteer training and management, scorekeeping, etc., are essential too.
Volunteering is also a great way to get to know people in our awesome community. I’ve had a great time getting to know our local parents as well as parents from around the country through volunteering. We really do have something special in our sport.
If you’ve spent time wondering why we need so many volunteers (even though registration seems spendy), check out the message below, which was written by the New England East RC team.
— Jason Chang
Why do climbing competitions require so many volunteers, even with all the registration fees?
In part, the reason is because climbing competitions involve a new, unique “field of play” every time. The climbing “field of play” is a set of never-before-seen routes/problems. A large majority of comp registration fees goes toward their creation, and extensive (sometimes volunteer) resources are also required to run a fair comp: judges, Iso, etc.
Most other sports use the same standardized, unchanged fields/venues over and over. Although these fields/venues require maintenance, it isn’t many thousands of dollars to build the “field of play” each and every event. Climbing comps require a large routesetting crew and 6-7 days of shutting down all/part of a revenue-generating climbing gym, followed by a competition in a sport requiring serious liability insurance for the gym and USA Climbing.
Most other sports don’t have the human resource requirements either. The entire onsight—or Isolation—format depends heavily on having Iso run properly, and well-trained judges to make fair and clear assessments of a climber’s achievement. To run a fair and safe comp for 250 competitors—which respects the effort that our climbers have put into training—requires almost 200 slots to be filled (nearly a 1:1 ratio). In comparison, a swim meet for over 200 competitors at an 8-lane pool often needs less than 15 volunteers/officials; a soccer tourney with 200 players may require 20-40 volunteers/officials. A climbing competition therefore typically requires 5x to 10x the number of volunteers as these other sports. While other sports can have a small fraction of families helping at the competitions, youth climbing events need to have most families involved in at least one volunteer role.
The quantity of volunteers is partially driven by the need for constant coverage. Since many volunteers have climbers in their family who are competing in the event, it’s important that they can briefly step away from their assignment to watch some of the action, while still ensuring a level of consistency in judging. The number of slots is sized to allow this coverage, and to meet the standards of quality and fairness expected.
That’s a quick outline of some reasons why the climbing comps require a registration fee AND require heavy volunteer participation from the parents. A reasonable expectation is that each climbing family provides at least one volunteer in each of the bouldering and sport seasons.
Thoughtful planning of judge pairing, so that volunteers can watch their climber, as well as putting less experienced judges with experienced judges, requires time. The earlier the signups are filled, the earlier that process can start.
The reality is:
- Competitors do pay a registration fee
- On top of that, we still do need many, many volunteers for these comps
- Often, we don’t get enough volunteers for these comps signed up early enough
- But we can help make that change!
Thank you!
— Your friendly (volunteer) New England East Regional Coordinator crew
