Hello everyone. Just stumpled onto this forum a few days aog and glad for it. Here's my situation and questions for those of you more experiences than me. We will be having a competition at our community climbing wall. The majority of competitors will be 6-12, novice to beginner climbers. As volunteers, my daughter and I have been doing the route setting for this wall for the past year so I have a pretty good gauge for what most of the kids can climb. The format is that each group will have two routes to climb with three attempts at each route. My plan was to make Route 1 pretty easy and Route 2 more difficult. The question is how easy and how difficult. These kids are not the next Sharma - most come in and climb once a week or a couple time a month. They love it, but it is not something they train for or practice regularly. When we usually set routes, we try to design them so it will take several sessions for a climber who is working at that particular grade to send them. But in the comp, they only have 3 attempts. What do I downgrade these to? For instance, if a climber is capable of climbing a 5.4 with a couple of hours work on it, is it appropriate to drop to a 5.2 for them to get a good effort in only 3 attempts? The idea of the comp is to get the kids excited and generate more interest - not blow them off the wall. Yet at the same time, I want to avoid everyone flashing the routes and seeing the comp as a joke. It's a delicate balance. It's much easier with the better and more experienced climbers.
any advice or comments would be appreciated.
Thanks,
jim