Team EVO Kids Crush Regionals, Many Move To Divisionals

Posted May 25, 2016

Last Saturday (May 14, 2016) EVO Rock + Fitness Concord held the 2016 Sport & Speed Youth Regionals Comp. We asked routesetter Sydney McNair (one of four setters for the event and head-setter for Concord) about the stoke that surrounded the process, but first, here are the EVO Team qualifiers moving on to Youth Divisional Championships:

From Concord:

Grant Dreffer
Nate Milliken
Matt Schwartz
Skyler Bergeron
Kira Bergeron

From Portland:

Liam Niles
Sam Preble
Max Polsky
Faith Arrison
Dena Arrison
Emily Cormier
Molly Frothingham
Annabelle Teng
Sidonia Summers

Liam Niles of EVO Portland – qualified to move onto Youth Divisional Championship

Here’s what Sydney McNair had to say about setting:

“Setting for the event is a blast—stressful—but a blast. A lot of preparation goes into making everything work. Starting with the gym layout; how many climbs we are setting, how many are lead climbs, how many stations we need available…”

About the challenges:

“Regionals is a real challenge because you get such a large range of climbing abilities, styles, strengths and general sizes of climbers. So as setters we have to account for all of those factors, knowing we’ll have first-time climbers and seasoned athletes alike. Our main objective is to set the routes in such a way that we separate each category as the climbers move from one route to the next. Ideally, we’d be left with zero ties. Our second goal is to have kids walking away psyched and happy.”

And overall:

“At the end of the day, I would say most of us (setters) are excited and anxious to see if we gauged our routes appropriately for the climbers that are attending.

When comp day rolls around and we get to watch the kids on our climbs it is awe inspiring, amazing and sometimes soul-crushing. Some of these kids just climb SO HARD!

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EVO Concord Kid Crushin’

It’s mind boggling, but at the same time, we as setters get to learn A LOT. It teaches us quite a bit getting to see the wide range of athletes on our climbs and helps us gauge where to improve next time around. At the end of the day, all of our routes did what we needed. Even though we had ties to break, we had great routes to put kids on for their super finals and those did the job.”