Team Rock Places 5th at ’17 Sport & Speed Nationals

Welcome back! Team Rock, the youth climbing team at The Rock Club in New Rochelle, NY, placed 5th in the nation at the 2017 Sport and Speed Youth National competition. Nationals took place in Kennesaw, GA at Stone Summit Climbing & Fitness Center on July 13th-16th.

Kids from all over the country come to compete whether they are on a team or not. There are 5 categories in USA Climbing’s competitions and about 50 kids in each category climbing to get from the qualifiers to semi-finals. Then, the top 20 kids in each category will climb for a spot in finals. Ashima Shiraishi and Kai Lightner, already big names in the climbing scene, competed as well!

Team Rock came in 5th place with 318 points for Speed and 364 points for Sport.
For each individual event there are mixed results and Team Rock had some highlights!

SPEED

Male Youth A – 10th place – Steven Kroleski
Best Time: 0:11.52

Male Youth B – 3rd place – Darren Skolnik
Best Time: 0:08.25

Male Youth D – 2nd place – Emmanuel Derima
Best Time: 0:06.24

Male Youth D – 6th place – Augustine Chi
Best Time: 0:07.45

Speed has become an insanely amazing experience to witness. One of the kids climbed 15m in 6.37 seconds. The world record is 5.48 seconds as of April 28,2017 by Iranian climber Reza Alipourshenandifar. Crazy!

    

SPORT

Female Youth C – 1st place – Norah Chi
Female Youth C – 2nd place – Olivia Ma
Male Youth C – 1st place – Lucas Oddi
Male Youth C – 3rd place – Isaac Leff
Female Youth D – 5th place – Sienna Perez
Male Youth D – 4th place – Augustine Chi
Male Youth D – 6th place – Emmanuel Derima

Nationals Sport climbing is a different from bouldering Nationals. Each day you climb one route. Two of those days are qualifiers. There is no isolation for this comp, you can watch other competitors climb the routes. They even have someone show you the climb, they call them the “white rabbit”. Think about Alice in Wonderland!

Team Rock has had a great year competing! Congrats to everyone on the team, we have seen you all train incredibly hard. Keep up the great work Rockstars!

All photo credits: Emil Rusev