Building an Exceptional Coaching Team For Your Indoor Climbing Gym

Building a top-tier coaching team can be what makes or breaks a program. Creating cohesive staffing that supports one another, communicates well, and compliments each other’s skills is critical in any workplace.

Within a climbing team, it can have massive impacts on the program and your larger gym culture. While building a coaching team can also depend on luck, timing, and other things, there are things you can do to create a team of coaches who thrive together.

This article will focus mostly on the competitive team environment, but much of this can be applied to larger programming teams

So What Does a Great Coaching Team Need?

A great coaching team comprises individuals with the skill set and experiences needed to support your climbing team.

Not all teams will have each of the things listed, some folks will have overlapping skills, and occasionally, you get the perfect storm of talent, skills, experiences, and humans.

Your coaching staff must have experience with competitions.  Athletic empathy and the ability to relate to your athletes' experiences are key pieces of the puzzle.

If no one on your team has this experience from being a youth competitor, it can still be gained through competing in the USAC North American Cup Series and other competitions.

I highly recommend coaches try competitions, even if it’s not your thing. It will make you a better coach to know what it’s like to sit in an ISO chair or to try and climb a hard boulder in four minutes.

Next, you need someone who understands movement well and can analyze it. Ideally, this is a skill all coaches build, but some folks have either the educational background or the critical eye to assess movement on the fly and coach for movement quality, not just alternative beta.

Movement quality and precision are becoming ever more critical in competition climbing.
You need a logistics person. Someone who understands how to get everyone where they are
going successfully and can handle timing, travel, and everything in between.

A highly organized individual who is a mastermind at getting things done will make life for your entire team exponentially easier. Sometimes, this person is also a great strategist and can coach your athletes on competition strategy, making the right calls, and knowing the when.

You need a mediator. Conflict happens, it’s normal. An important skill set on any team is someone who has patience and the ability to mediate conflicts between coaches, athletes, and parents, as well as help mediate the internal battles athletes often face under pressure.

The culture creator. Each team needs a culture creator, someone with relentless team spirit. This person creates a supportive and uplifting team environment. They know how to fall back on core values and remind everyone why we do what we do in the first place. 

Lastly, a strength training specialist. Someone needs to be able to correct form, drive workouts, and implement them well. Often, the movement specialist may also be your strength training specialist.

So many other skills lend themselves to a great team, like communication, creativity, mentorship, motivation, and the person with all the best snacks. It’d be impossible to list everything here. Often, coaching teams may only have 2-3 people on them. So, looking for several of these qualities in one person is usually a must.

Assessing Skill Sets

One of the first things you need to do to build a flourishing coaching team is turn inward. Assessing your strengths and weaknesses as part of a team and knowing what you need to complement your own skill set is an excellent first step. This process requires honesty, and sometimes it can be valuable to get feedback from others to understand what skill sets compliment your own.

If you’re adding one additional person to your team, it’s valuable to repeat the process of analyzing skill sets for your entire team.

Look for gaps in your cumulative experiences or areas where you’d like to bolster your skills. You can even add notes to your job description for specifics on the kind of human you’d like to add to your team and what they bring to the table.

The Hiring Process

As noted above, list exactly what you’re looking for when posting your job listing. As you go through the interviewing process, make sure all involved in the hiring process know your team's needs.

This helps ensure that you aren’t simply looking for someone with the most experience, but someone who truly rounds out your team.

Once you know exactly what you need, you can tailor your process to support your goals. It’s easy to get excited about a new team member with a wealth of experience, but it’s often critical not to lose sight of what you truly need within your team at that moment. It may be worth teaching someone skills they lack because they bring something to the table that you need.

Culture Maintenance

Once you’ve hired a great team, how do you ensure they stay a great team? Well, that comes down to leading, managing, and checking in regularly. Facilitating optional social times for coaches can be a great bonding experience.

Regular staff check-ins that leave space for feedback in either direction is another great tool for catching conflict and issues before they arise and creating a culture of feedback that keeps leadership aware of the ins and outs of your staff and how they are feeling in their roles. We all have different strengths, and we all need space to develop our weaknesses into strengths.

Giving your team space to flex all their skills and keep them finely tuned, rather than relying on each person for their strengths, allows your team to become more well-rounded and rely on each other more.

There are many more tried and true ways to keep your team happy like upward mobility, great pay and benefits, professional development, and more. However, people want to stay in environments where they are happy, supported, and given space to grow.

The members of your coaching team are flowers in a garden, and with a happy coaching team, sprout the seeds of healthy and happy athletes.

About the Author

Tuesday "Kirby" Kahl is a movement specialist, passionate instructor, and athlete. She is the Programs Director of Skyhook Bouldering in Portland, Oregon. Kirby has worked every job in a climbing gym, from manager, retail buyer, routesetter, and everything in between, but her true passion is instruction. Kirby's primary populations are youth and adaptive competitive athletes, but she loves assisting climbers of all ages and abilities and helping them reach their goals. She is a student at Portland State University studying Applied Health and Fitness and minoring in Neuroscience. She has been coaching for the last 15 years across several sports, enjoying a bubbling career as a swim coach before falling in love with climbing. You can find her bouldering, multi-pitching, competing, or backcountry skiing when she's not in school or coaching. Off the wall, she's a dedicated plant mom and painter.