Mountain Vista Climbing Team
Our Team
Mountain Vista High School's team is a semi-competitive climbing team that competes against other high school teams in the American Scholastic Climbing League. From beginners to experienced climbers, everyone is accepted and challenged during the climbing season. Learn how to belay and improve at climbing while making friends throughout the high school climbing community.
American Scholastic Philosophy
- Encourage the team aspect of the sport (individuals have other forums in which to compete).
- Take steps to make our results and hardware compatible with other high school competitions so that schools can
lobby for inclusion as a varsity sport.
- Encourage well-rounded climbers (requiring both bouldering problems and roped climbs at the State Final).
- Support all regions, schools and individuals trying to develop high school climbing.Have an event that is limited to
the best climbers in the state. In addition, allow all levels to compete in some kind of finale. (Varsity vs JV concept).
Region Format
The American Scholastic Climbing League consists of five regions - we are in the Denver SouthEast Region. During the regular season, teams from each region compete within their respective regions, but all regions climb against each other at the annual state competition in February.
Denver SouthEast - Denver South East surrounding Metro Area
Jen Vidal (jvidal@cherrycreekschools.org)
Denver NorthWest - Denver North-West surrounding Metro Area
Tyler Bevington (tbevington@jajags.com)
NoCO - Broomfield, Boulder & Ft. Collins surrounding areas.
SoCO - Monument south to Pueblo
Rob Gilbert (rgilbert@fvs.edu)
WestSloppers - Western Colorado Slope and Southern Rockies
Dave Meyer (dmeyer@crms.org)
Competitions
The ASCL competitions begin in October and run through February each year. Regular season competitions begin in October and go through the beginning of February, while the Regional Final and State Competition are held at the end of February. Normally, competitions are held at various gyms every other Saturday during the competition season and practices are held twice a week.
So, are competitions a race to see who can get up the wall the fastest? To put it simply, no. At competitions, there are twenty different routes (bouldering problems/roped routes) that vary in difficulty - route number one is the easiest, while route number twenty is the most difficult. The harder the route, the more points it is worth. Climbers are given three hours to complete their top five routes and scores are tallied at the end to determine the results. In other words, points are earned based off of the completion of routes, which increase in point value as the number of the route increases.
By the end of the regional competition, climbers from each region are split into JV and Varsity levels for the state competition, depending on a climber's performance at the regional comp and their prerequisites to climb on Varsity.