This past weekend, Kelly and I went to the Philly Rock Gym Oaks and competed in their Rope Burn competition. It was actually her idea. The comp was open to all skill levels, so we went in as novice, expecting there to be tons and tons of competition. After all, neither of us had ever competed before and when the guys ahead of us said they climbed 5.10s and 5.11s, they were only placed in as intermediates. We may have climbed a few 5.10s, but not more than a handful and definitely no 5.11s.
I’ll get right to the punch with this one – we both won first in our level and were told we should try intermediate next time. Kelly would have placed in intermediate with her score, but I would have fallen short by a few hundred points… It’s something to work towards, but not too bad all the same.
It was a great experience and definitely a new view of climbing. One thing that really stood out, though, was the number of young climbers there. We’re used to Reading Rocks where the kids there are either with boy/girl scouts or birthday parties. The regulars are college aged and older. Naturally, we figured there’d be tons of adults in the comp. Instead, we were outnumbered by the youth – and those were only the youth that had made it to the final round. We later found the score sheet from the youth comp, which was 2 pages of names in about 8 point font; probably about 150 kids or thereabout.
I think it shows an interesting shift. When I was a youth, kids played team sports. Unless you were practicing with your team, you really weren’t able to practice the sport. Sure, you could practice juggling a soccer ball, but without others, you couldn’t practice playing soccer. It’s not quite the same.
With things like cross country it’s a bit different. You can run on your own and, ultimately, no one cares about your team’s performance. And maybe that’s a good comparison because I think that these kids were also on teams, where there was a team score, but you worked for your own individual score. The team performance is a great measure of the caliber of your training, but that’s all.
What it seems like is that we have this changing definition of what a team is. We now have climbing teams in the way that we have snowboarding teams. You’re no longer reliant on the rest of the members of a team to be successful.
And that’s what we’ve seen in music in the past decade. You no longer need ANYONE. Whether you’re a band or a solo act, you no longer need a “team” to succeed. As technology has advanced, more and more is able to be DIY. You can record in your bedroom, do your own publishing, book your own shows, and publicize your own material. It’s a full time job, but it’s the full time job of an individual, not of some corporate entity.
This aligns well with the ever fleeting need for a label. It used to be that that was the only way, but now it’s common knowledge that you don’t need them. They can enable a lot of neat things – organizing tours, collaborations, etc – but are not necessary. You can succeed without them.
But to succeed, you have to dedicate your life to it. While we were there, we talked to the one kid’s dad about the youth programs. They were from North Jersey, but would travel all over the place to compete. The previous weekends, they had been up in Massachusetts for competitions. For climbing competitions?! On top of an almost certainly grueling training schedule, this kid is traveling up and down the east coast. And all of the kids there were pretty much like that from what I could gather.
These kids are competing. So are you. You may not be lined up next to your competitors, but know that you’ve got every other musician out there vying to flood peoples’ airwaves. And there will always be someone who will do it for cheaper or for free. You have to be the best. And that takes no team.