The Climbing Wall Association's blog is a place for indoor climbing professionals to find useful and relevant information from industry and business experts. Stay on top of best practices, thought leadership, and trends by subscribing to our newsletter!
Creating new games and activities for a climbing program re-energizes participants, coaches, and brings a creative experience to climbing skills. It gives coaches new activities that they can use throughout the season with their teams, sparking creative thinking and group bonding. The... Continue Reading
When planning a climbing season, climbing camp session, or any type of climbing program, the first thing to consider is desired outcomes. In other words, what are the goals you as the coach would like to see your participants reach? By identifying outcomes at the beginning stages of planning, a... Continue Reading
In part one of this series, we examined behavioral management and different types of disruptive behavior. We’re continuing to expand on this while providing tactics for effectively handling these issues and proactively using empathy as a coach. While addressing challenging behaviors, it is... Continue Reading
Behavior management is a challenging skill to develop for coaches working with youth. It takes consistent practice and requires the coach to evolve along with their groups. Effective group management for youth teams includes a variety of tools that, when implemented appropriately, keeps the group... Continue Reading
As COVID-19 threatens the health of our global community, climbing gyms across the world are facing challenges unlike any we’ve seen before. As climbing gyms begin to reopen, operations cannot be business as usual. In this time of uncertainty and change, the indoor climbing industry has... Continue Reading
Climbing gyms in many parts of the US have begun to reopen or are making plans to. The policies that gyms have created around occupancy, sanitation, and personal protective equipment are great guidelines for users. However, returning to running youth programming while keeping young climbers and... Continue Reading
Climbing gyms are in the midst of expanding program offerings to ensure that their members’ needs are being met: fitness classes, climbing skill clinics, and community events, among other offerings. A popular addition to these client services is member meetups for adults, usually structured... Continue Reading
A few months ago, the CWA held a professional development event at the Planet Granite in San Francisco – part of the CWA Meetings regional events program. As the owner of a brand-new gym trying to figure out how to be a gym owner, routesetter, and instructor all at the same time, I was... Continue Reading
As coaches and climbing instructors, breaking down our goals for participants - either technical, social, or recreational - into achievable steps can be a daunting task. The key to helping participants reach their goals and giving a familiar learning structure to our programs is sequencing... Continue Reading
A phenomenon that we often see when working with climbing programs is a lack of time for reflection. Coaches and facilitators have limited time with their with young climbers, and practices are so jam packed with activity that by the end, there's no time to reflect on what each climber... Continue Reading
Posted By Bix Firer and Pat Brehm, Monday, April 8, 2019 Establishing buy-in and cooperation from the young climbers in a climbing program must go beyond simply establishing a set of rules and reactively enforcing them. Rather, it is important that the structure of the program is... Continue Reading
Social and emotional learning (SEL) has become a hot topic among youth workers of all stripes. The core competencies of SEL, as identified by CASEL, have positive implications on young people’s lives: “improved classroom behavior, an increased ability to manage stress and depression,... Continue Reading
