2011 SEATTLE BOULDERING CHALLENGE.

The oldest and biggest bouldering comp in the Northwest, the SBC, took place this past November 19th. This was Sidney's 5th year in a row competing at the SBC. Unfortunately, I forgot to take any pictures of her climbing and I have not found any of her on the web. I did take video which I will post on my youTube channel, Chasesidney13, sometime in the near future.

As you hopefully have read in a previous post, last year Sidney qualified in 11th place after the Redpoint round in the Open category. They only took 10 to Finals but because of an injury to Tiffany Melius, she was able to climb in Finals and moved up to 8th place! Her past SBC results have shown a clear arc of getting better every year so I was curious if she could continue to improve this year.

Sidney, as always, started out strong and flashed quite a few high climbs. She then looked around for some higher climbs and worked some projects. With a half hour left in the session, she thought she was good enough to make Finals so we shut it down to rest up and wait for results. It was very hard to gauge her score compared to the other Open competitors as this is not a USA Climbing youth event. A lot of youth compete in it but it is definitely an event geared for adults. With Sidney not even being a teenager, yet, my goal for her is just to improve her Redpoint score every year. If she makes Finals, that's just icing on the cake and gets her more experience. I know the Finals routes are set for the adults and that's the way it should be. Well, Sidney improved again by qualifying for Finals in 7th place this year.

As I expected, there were 4 Finals routes and they were TOUGH! The first route had a bunch of really big holds that Sidney is not a fan of, yet, but she flashed the route with no problems. The second route she climbed well and got two holds from the top on her first try but did the wrong beta for her and fell. Her second try she used the correct beta but was not able to execute the move, fell and then decided not to try it again as time was short. She thinks she could have made the route if she did the correct beta her first try instead of her second. The third route no competitor came even close to making with Sidney getting to around where everyone else was falling. The fourth route gave her all kinds of trouble as the beta was really hard for her to read and she was hurt by her lack of height. All in all, she climbed really well and finished in 9th place for Finals, a couple of spots back from where she started. However, she got some more experience climbing really HARD problems in front of a big crowd so it was a very positive night.

Here is a really cool warped view of the event. (Photo courtesy of Stone Gardens)


These are Sidney's results for the past 5 years which really shows her improvement.
2007 - Age 8 - Redpoint score was 65th out of 76 female competitors.
2008 - Age 9 - 48th out of 90.
2009 - Age 10 - 22nd out of 77.
2010 - Age 11 - 11th out of 96 - Qualified for Finals and finished 8th.
2011 - Age 12 - 7th out of 100 - Finished 9th after Finals.
2012 - Age 13 - ????????

Looking forward to next year!