Dylan Heinstein ’26 dangled by his left arm, fingers gripping a pink artificial rock a couple of centimeters thick. The cocaptain of the Brown Competitive Climbing Club stretched his right leg until his foot found a boulder. Extending his left leg to another boulder, he was now in a split. Heinstein lifted himself up the wall to the final hold of the climb. He finished the course on his fifth try. 

That was one of eight courses Heinstein and other Brown students attempted during the club’s second-ever collegiate competition, held in a Boston-area gym on November 16. It drew nearly 100 students from across the Northeast, each of whom had 15 attempts per course.

Competitive bouldering is based not on speed but on the number of attempts it takes to complete a course, which makes gaming out a strategy beforehand key to success. “It is a mental challenge; it is a physical challenge,” said Maren White ’27. “You have to puzzle together the problems on the wall.”  

Heinstein and fellow cocaptain Ceci D’Hondt-Gorbea ’28 started the club in spring 2025. D’Hondt-Gorbea had competed at the national level in high school, and when she learned that Brown had a recreational club but not a competitive one, she vowed, “Now I need to start one.” With approval from the club sports council, they kicked off in the fall.

Sixty students showed up for tryouts. Fifteen made the team. Of those, nine are on the training team. The other six earned competition spots alongside Heinstein and D’Hondt-Gorbea.

When Zacharias Escalante ’22 ScM, ’26 PhD, started climbing as an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, it made him feel “so accomplished, kind of badass too,” he said. Now climbing competitively at Brown, he said, “I’m forced to focus on the present, what I’m doing in the ‘right now.’”