Photo: James E. Mills
CLIMBING FOR CHANGE
A MISSION TO MAKE CLIMBING MORE INCLUSIVE
“In climbing there’s always a new puzzle to solve. There’s always something that captures your attention. I remember standing in front of the wall and thinking of all the sequences I could do. I found other sports more repetitive – they didn’t captivate me in the way that climbing did.” Kai’s gym in Fayetteville had a youth team that he slotted right into, and from there he started doing junior competitions. As Kai puts it, “Fayetteville isn’t exactly a climber town. The west side of North Carolina is pretty mountainous, but Fayetteville is on the east side and it’s a flat town. Route setting was haphazard. I think I trained on the same route for Nationals five years in a row.” With his mom’s support, Kai would regularly travel six hours to Atlanta to train in a better equipped facility.
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Kai became a junior national champion before he even had the chance to climb outdoors. “I was completely happy in my gym world, and leaving that was intimidating, but I thought I needed to give it a shot. The first time I climbed outside was at the New River Gorge. What I liked most was just being in nature. It was really calming and transformative.” At 13, as soon as Kai was eligible, he competed in the World Youth Championships in Canada, where he placed fourth. Kai comes from a single parent household, and in the U.S., there is little funding for junior competitors. Families are expected to foot the bill. He remembers flying home from that event and his mom telling him that they might have to cut back on competitions for financial reasons. Fortunately for Kai, he had also climbed his first 8c+ routes that year, and there were people in the industry who had taken notice of his talent and had heard he could do with some extra funding. Days after returning home from the World Championships, he received his first financial sponsorship offers. The timing couldn’t have been better because the next World Championships were due to take place in New Caledonia, and he would go on to win.
A LACK OF DIVERSITY Throughout Kai’s years of competing at junior level, he was one of few athletes of color. Kai remembers feeling out of place at times walking into a climbing gym or competition being the only black person. He has volunteered with youth groups, adaptive climbing and other DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) initiatives since his high school days. Kai came to realize that, as a professional climber, he had corporate connections that he could make use of to support his grassroots activism and thereby amplify the opportunities for the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) community. Thus, Climbing for Change was born. As Kai says, “I’ve kind of inherently become people’s go-to person for advice on DEI because I stand out as a black professional climber. With the Black Lives Matter move-
Photo: James E. Mills
Growing up in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Kai always had plenty of uncontained energy and would routinely get in trouble for climbing things. In 2006, at the age of six, he climbed the flagpole at his mom’s office, which prompted one of his mom’s colleagues to mention that there was a climbing gym in town. She left the gym’s address on a sticky note, and after school that very day, Kai’s mom took him to the gym. He has been in love with the sport ever since.
