Climbing Camp Lead Coach

Overview

Led summer camp programming at Sender One Aliso Viejo, running daily climbing sessions for youth groups. Responsible for instruction, safety, group management, and the parent-facing side of the camp, progress updates, scheduling questions, and day-to-day concerns.

What I did

• Instruction — taught climbing technique, movement fundamentals, and safety practices to campers across a range of ages and experience levels
• Programming — planned and ran daily camp schedules balancing skill instruction, climbing time, games, and rest
• Group management — kept groups of kids engaged, safe, and moving through multi-hour sessions
• Parent communication — managed expectations around progress, behavior, scheduling, and safety questions
• Safety oversight — enforced gym rules, checked harnesses and knots, and managed risk throughout each session

What I learned

How to read a room and adjust in real time, a group that’s losing focus needs a different approach than a group that’s frustrated by a hard route. Communicating with parents taught me to translate technical progress into plain language, which is the same skill as explaining an engineering decision to a non-technical stakeholder. Both are about building trust through clarity.