News Detail
Climbing Team Starts Season with Solid Stats
On Tuesday, the Episcopal climbing team traveled to the Sportrock gym in Sterling, VA for our first meet of the season against Sandy Springs. The team this year is buoyed by a strong group of returners, especially on the girls side. With only a few practices under our belt, we wanted to see what we could do on the bouldering walls.
Bouldering is a type of very technical climbing on short walls and without ropes. Each route up the wall is marked and designated with a difficulty level, with V0 being the easiest, and going up as high as V10 or greater. Each climber has 90 minutes to complete his or her best three problems successfully, and the more challenging the climb the more points allotted. The varsity score is based on the best five scores out of six varsity climbers, and the JV score for each team sums the next best five scores. More information about the meet formats and scoring can be found here.
Our girls’ team is very deep with returning climbers, and our varsity starting lineup will be quite hard to choose all season. This team is one of the strongest we’ve put together in my 13-year tenure and definitely the deepest. Gracie Guest '19 scored our top total, tying for first place in the girls’ division and fifth place overall. She earned 26 points off of a pair of V4 climbs and an impressive V5 route. Jane Owen '19 and Juliet Faris ’19 each scored 22 points on V3, V4, V4- sends. They tied for the second best girls’ score in the meet and eleventh overall. Nettie Webb ’18 and Arden Faires ’19 both climbed V3, V3, V4 for 20 points, a tie for 3rd place girls/16th place overall. Lilly Wilcox ’18 started on the varsity six and earned 14 points with V2, V2, V3, which is the score dropped to the JV. The girls’ varsity handedly defeated Sandy Springs 110 – 68.
The varsity boys are a mixed group of three very strong returning climbers and a small cadre of new teammates vying for those coveted varsity spots. As our older boys lead the newer climbers to improve, this group started well and yet will still see a vast improvement in score this season. Paul Pivirotto ’19 and Kidron Kollin ’19 each climbed a very impressive trio of V5 routes for 30 points and second place in both the boys and overall categories. Collin Fitzpatrick ’19 just missed tying them with a V4 and two V5’s for 28 points and fourth place. Freshman Jackson Montague ’21 earned a very strong 22 points off V3, V4-, V4 for an impressive 9th place boys/11th place overall tie in his first ever meet. Rookie Thomas Adkins ’20 rounded out our scores with 14 points on V2, V2, V3. Newcomer Rob Deaton ’20 was our first score out of the varsity six with a trio of V0’s. The boys’ squad narrowly lost to SSFS 124-130.
The rest of the strong EHS climbing team scored in the JV category. Mei Kuo ’19 did not start on the varsity as she had been absent for a conference much of the previous week, but actually tied Guest with 26 for first place in the girls and fifth overall. She will be back in the varsity mix after break. Cindy Xin ’20 earned 18 points, sending her first V4- in a meet. Olivia Tucker ’19 earned 14 points and Wardie Cammack ’20 earned 12. Our only other boy climber on Tuesday, Bobby Hood ’19, scored 10. Amy John-Terry ’21 scored two V0’s and a nice V2- for 8 points. The remainder of the team, Arabella Dixon ’21, Bridget McAree ’21, Arianna Otoo ’21, and Debby Lee ’21 all scored three V0 climbs so that no member of the team left a blank spot on the scorecard. This is an impressive feat and shows a lot of promise for what this team can do in the future.
All scores and meet totals can be found on this spreadsheet.
