Blocworks Midtown
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Specs: Blocworks Climbing opened its second bouldering gym in January 2025 in Midtown, Oklahoma City, about five years after opening its first location in Edmond, Oklahoma. Following the launch of the Edmond gym, Owners and Operators Mariah and Evan Small identified some “gaps in Oklahoma markets,” Evan said, which prompted them to begin looking at towns where they could open a second facility. The spot for the Midtown gym “kind of fell into our laps a little bit,” Evan said. “A buddy of mine was branching out of brewing. He was starting a brick-and-mortar sandwich shop in Midtown, and they had a massive empty space that was almost 5,000 square feet.” The building would house Goose Deli—the sandwich shop of Evan’s friend—and some coworking spaces, with room for the kind of gym the Smalls were envisioning. “It just really clicked pretty early on that it’d at least be a good idea to try if we were going to do a second spot,” Evan said.
The Midtown gym is located about 20 minutes away from the Edmond location, a distance that felt appropriate to the Smalls; the two gyms complement rather than compete with one another, Evan explained, and they have found the overhead costs to be manageable, since the two gyms are on the smaller side. “In the long term, it is actually a good thing because it adds value to our membership,” he said about running two gyms within a short drive from each other, adding that it was “the minimum distance that we would want.” In addition to the two Blocworks locations, members can also access Climb Tulsa—a mixed-discipline climbing gym in Tulsa, Oklahoma, about an hour drive away—through a partnership between the two businesses. “It is such a unique relationship, and we’re not going to cannibalize each other because of our distance and our businesses,” Evan said. “They are very different…I think the community definitely feels that they’re excited.”
At the Midtown gym, climbers have access to 1,825 square feet of climbing wall surface on walls reaching 15 feet. Members can use the members-only strength training room, which is exclusive “primarily due to size,” Evan said of the 300-square-foot space, adding, “We didn’t want to overcrowd, and we wanted to add value to the membership.” Additionally, there is a retail pro shop, adult and youth programming, and 56 bouldering problems.
Evan is also the Director of Routesetting at Blockworks and sets with the teams consistently. He started climbing in 2009 and began setting by 2011, he said, so routesetting is very important to him. “I don’t think I can communicate how routesetting-focused our gym is,” Evan stated. Blocworks Midtown operates with circuit grading, with 12 boulders set in each circuit, “so each person is served the same,” he explained. Additionally, in the last year and a half, Blocworks made the decision to be “a gym that is owned and operated by routesetters,” Evan said, so now managers at both locations have become fully trained routesetters themselves. “That’s what makes Blocworks so unique in my perspective,” Evan summarized. “Everything we do is routesetting focused.”
Walls: Walltopia
Flooring: Walltopia
CRM Software: Capitan
Website: www.climbblocworks.com/midtown-bouldering-gym
Instagram: @BlocworksClimbing
In Their Words: “Once you open one location or you’re starting to plan for the second, you realize how much fluff you purchased early on for the first one. It can even come down to purchasing too much for your retail shop, or, man, we bought iPads instead of Fire tablets. Every dollar, when you finance businesses the way we do—we’re personal guarantors, we don’t have any investors—every dollar matters.” – Evan Small, Co-Owner and Operator at Blocworks
