Sports climbing has taken Jackson High senior all over the world

MILL CREEK — As a younger boy, Alex Fritz tried baseball, swimming and even bicycle motocross. Not for him, he decided.

But when Fritz was 7 years old, he discovered climbing. It happened when he attended a birthday party at REI and had a chance to scale a 25-foot climbing wall.

“I was one of the only kids that made it up the wall without crying,” said Fritz, who is today a 17-year-old senior at Jackson High School.

A decade later he is still going up walls, and doing it well enough that he is one of the best in the world in his age group. Twice he has been to the International Federation of Sports Climbing (IFSC) Youth World Championships, including a nine-day trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, last month for the 2010 championships.

Competing in lead climbing — climbers pick a route up a wall while periodically clipping a rope to attachments along the way — Fritz finished 17th out of 76 athletes ages 16-17 from around the world. He was third among five United States climbers.

The year before, Fritz was also at the world championships, this time in Valence, France. And in late November he will be in Ibarra, Ecuador, for the Pan American Continental Championships.

Traveling the world to compete is a unique experience for a teenager, he acknowledged. “Not too many kids get to do something like this,” he said.

Fritz has spent the last several years as a member of the youth climbing team at Vertical World, which has five gyms in the Puget Sound area, including Everett where he trains four or five days a week, usually for three hours a session.

Climbing “tests your mental and physical abilities,” he said. “And when you're on the wall, when you're on a route, everything else goes away. Nothing else matters but what you're doing right then. You just focus on that route.”

For all his success, Fritz still has trouble convincing people that climbing is a sport.

“Every PE teacher I've had since elementary school has not been supportive,” he said. “We even had a climbing wall at Heatherwood (Middle School in Mill Creek). It was like 15 feet off the ground and 20 feet across, and most of the kids struggled getting 3 feet into it. I would do it easily, but the teachers were like, ‘Oh, rock climbing, that's a hobby.'

“A lot of my friends are supportive. Some of them are top-notch in skiing or rowing, and they're in the same boat as me because no one takes their sports as seriously as football, baseball or soccer. But they realize that rock climbing is as much of a sport as theirs is, and as much as football, baseball and soccer.

“If I spent a couple of months on the football team,” he added, “I'll bet I could get to the same point that most of the kids on that team are. But (most football players) could spend years and not get to the level I'm at in climbing.”

Fritz, who is doing his high school senior project on the safety of climbing, says the sport “is not actually as dangerous as everyone thinks it is. I see football, baseball and soccer players come in with injuries every week at my school, but I've never been injured in the 10 years I've been climbing. As long as you're doing it right and you're not being stupid about it, there's really no way that you can get hurt.

“Also, even if you're just a recreational climber it's really fun. And I think it might be an anti-drug, too. Kids that don't play sports tend to get into trouble, so (climbing) has helped me to stay focused and it's taught me a lot of discipline that helps me with school. ... I can push myself to be the best I can.”