Help Serenity and Tai Reach Collegiate Nationals

Hello Everyone,

My name is Serenity and I am a community college student and competitive rock climber. My brother and I train together and we are gathering funds with the hope to participate in the 2025 Collegiate National Championships in Salt Lake City. We live in Virginia and neither of our community colleges have a rock climbing team, coaches, or funding. We can solve two of these issues by being each other’s coach and teammate, but we still lack the finances to make our dream of going to Nationals together a reality.

Getting to climb and compete at this level is meaningful to me because I have learned so much about who I want to be in the world from my experiences in sports. I know what it is like to dedicate five hours a day, year after year, to deliberate practice of a skill, and to keep focusing to do my homework even when I am tired after a long day of training and classes. I not only value hard work, but enjoy it. I have gotten to practice discipline, and become better at time management, training between school and family responsibilities. I know how I wish to carry myself in a competitive environment, to stay true to my values no matter how others around me are behaving. Right now, rock climbing is not a sport to build a career on, so even though I will not be a professional athlete, the lessons I learn and the experiences I have from exploring the world of elite athletics, first throughout high school and now my early college years, are invaluable and highly applicable to any field of life. I hope to continue participating in sports even as I work towards more diverse goals in life.

I really appreciate having my brother as a training partner. I know that I would not have been able to excel in climbing as I have if it had not been for my whole family supporting me in all kinds of ways. My brother is really good at researching training, gathering and sorting through the information and distilling it. He always offers to pass on what he learns and is invested not only in his own climbing, but also in helping me. Since we share this sport, we get to keep spending time together, even as we grow into our own lives. At the gym, we can coach each other, belay each other, and analyze climbs and techniques together. At home, our group energy keeps us going even when we’re tired at the end of a long day of studying. Maybe one of us is ready to trudge up the stairs to bed, but the other remembers that we still have one more finger strength workout to do, and in this way, we become better than if we trained alone.

I believe sporting competitions can be a positive thing in the world because they provide an opportunity for people to rally together around something that makes them stronger and healthier. Sports can be a place where differences in politics and rhetoric can fade into the background and we become one group of people who are like-minded in our love of movement and the enjoyment of developing this aspect of our human potential. Climbing is particularly conducive to this because we are not in direct competition against each other, like in tennis, boxing, or soccer. Instead, each individual is competing against themselves on the climb. The culture of rock climbing is such that it is commonplace to encourage our fellow competitors, problem solve together, help each other even as we compete, and cheer for each other as loudly as we can. It is not uncommon to be hoarse after a competition from cheering your friends up the wall.

Hi everyone, Tai here: Serenity already said a lot about discipline, hard work, and why climbing competitions are important, so I’d just like to add a little bit about my personal journey with the sport. I got into climbing in my last year of high school after studying music for most of my childhood. I have enjoyed transferring what I learned about discipline, dedication, and practice techniques from the piano bench onto the climbing wall. Competition climbing has also given me many opportunities to work on my tendency for negative self-criticism. Evaluating rankings and planning competition tactics are important parts of success but can quickly turn into opportunities to put myself down. The development of positive self-criticism is a skill I am still working on, but I have already seen just how helpful it can be both in competitions and other areas of my life.

My sister has been one of the best training partners one could ask for. Her dedication to the sport was one of the main things that inspired me to start seriously training and competing in climbing. Because we still live together, we are regularly able to inspire each other to finish our training even at times when the other person wouldn't have done it on their own.

We are very excited that we both qualified to compete at Nationals, and we would love to attend together as a brother and sister team. There is a lot of work to be done in a short period of time, as the competition is less than a month away, and we need to raise the funds to cover entry fees, transportation, and lodging. Thank you for considering helping us get there.