I wish I took photos of the routes I threw up today but sadly I didn’t and going back to langford is a bit of a hassle for just some photos. That said this week I focused on setting for smaller children because I’ve been struggling with my coaching 3-4 year olds. This was my debut as setting and there was a lot of nerves behind it but I kept in mind what my 3-4 year olds are capable of and what kind of moves they enjoy doing and how they holistically route read. I started with creating their ideal route then tweaking it to force certain lessons I want to force. This thought process kind of turned my initial blog post on its head because I started as a learner who was forced to learn by myself with a tool that an unseen teacher provided me. Now I’m stepping in to that role of being the unseen teacher which has changed my perspective on climbing. The best part about my setting though was that even though it was built with my students in mind I saw a lot of drop ins that came in practicing really hard on my routes. I think the value behind the climbs I put up was more defined by how motivating they were. Not everyone was capable of doing it on their first try but with every attempt they learned more and more and the gradual release of information on the climb kept them interested. This is something I’m going to investigate more especially for next week when I step in to coach junior league next week.

Image generated with bing AI image generator. Prompt was to create a bouldering route. Tool accessible here