Community Service
MetroRock — Everett, MA

Some people do trail work. Others replace tats. Still others remove spray paint, clean up trash, or host fundraisers. Some people simply have more time to get involved with things and they live their lives in their cocoons. It’s not a bad thing, and the cocoons may not be that small or simple in the end. I just can’t do that stuff, at least not yet, not at this point in time in my life when I’m still figuring things out and enjoying the adventure. Someday when the adventure ends, then I’ll look back and see the well-worn path I’ve left behind. And then I’ll go out and make the path pretty, accessible, and fun for the others who stumble along the same patch of dirt that I bumbled along. Until then, I like judging comps.

It’s not much to judge a comp. One learns the rules and applies them. If one is lucky, then there are no complaints. The kids are good kids, too, and the parental involvement is generally outstanding. This isn’t like baseball, and I know that from personal experience. I’ve coached baseball before and parents are tough for both the kids and the coaches. I’m not saying there aren’t any bad apples at climbing comps, but the vast majority of the volunteers are parents who, when their child is climbing the route they are judging, remove themselves out of fairness. Is that a rule? I’m not sure (it probably is), but even if it wasn’t I’d still see the same parents stepping aside. This isn’t the blind mouse calling a ball a strike. It’s a climbing competition, and there is something different in the air. The atmosphere is healthier for some reason.

I’ve only done a handful of comps over the past few years. I’m lucky enough to have judged at two national championships and two divisionals along with a couple of regionals, too. The lower the comp level the better the kids and parents behave. I’ve never had a kid complain at a regional comp. There are usually a couple of kids fighting for an advantage at divisionals, but they always sign their scorecards once the judges confer, discuss, and decide that the judges got the call right. A couple of years ago I had one girl at nationals from Texas tell me before she even started climbing that if I didn’t get the call right then she’d sue. She might have been bred by a well-to-do family but she was white trash to the core. On the flip side, and in the same age group, another girl cried when she didn’t get the score she thought she had earned. She didn’t complain, but the tears were unavoidable. Thankfully one of the judges had a camcorder and was reviewing the climb as we handed the girl the pen to sign her scorecard. It was subtle, but all three judges had missed something: where we had all seen her reach for the next hold, and where we had all seen air between her fingertips and the plastic, there was something amiss. Her fingers had stretched out with her elbow, the bottom of her lip was pulled in tight under her upper teeth, and her tense body flew upward to the hold. We could see the effort was there, but effort only gets a kid a third of a point. There was no question that she tried. But at the point where her body stopped moving upward and was now heading downward, where we thought she didn’t touch the hold, we saw her body jolt, if only for a slight moment on the way the down and we wondered, “Could her body stop like that in mid air when it was now clearly falling?” We watched it again and saw it again. And then we watched it again. It was difficult to understand what we were seeing. It was so quick that we couldn’t blink. But each time we reviewed it the movement became clearer. She stopped twice in mid air: once when she had reached the top of her leap, and again, a few fractions of a moment after she began her descent, her body shifted direction slightly enough that instead of falling straight down she fell closer to the hold she was trying to reach. She had touched the hold, and our human eyes were proven wrong when we finally paused the video at the right moment in time. We gave her the extra two one-tenths of a point for touching the usable surface and she cried again, except this time she was thanking us and happy. In fact, she apologized for not making it clearer when she leaped and for us watching the video when we didn’t have to (and she didn’t even ask us to review it). She didn’t finish very high. The girl from Texas finished higher, but I’d take the crying girl any day and everyday on my team.