Ninja Climbers
Dan Holguin guides kids through an overhanging rope obstacle during the Ninja Climbers camp at Rockfish Fitness and Climbing.
Laelia Pappenfus races through the quintuple steps on a recent Saturday as part of the Ninja Climbers camp at Rockfish Fitness and Climbing. (Daniel McKay photos/Whitefish Pilot)
A few kids recently got to spend a Saturday testing themselves to find out what it takes to be a Ninja Warrior.
Rockfish Climbing and Fitness recently hosted Ninja Climbers, a half-day camp for kids ages 5-11 that mimicked the obstacle courses of the popular TV show “American Ninja Warrior.”
Dan Holguin, a competitor on “American Ninja Warrior” since 2015, put the event together for the 15 kids who participated.
The young warriors split into two groups led by Holguin and Alex “Whitey” White, working on the skills needed for the obstacle course and basic bouldering practice at the gym.
After a few hours of practice, the kids got to run the course for real, with a disco ball, colorful spotlights and thumping music as parents and other kids cheered them on.
“What makes this really unique is that it’s combining rock climbing and Ninja Warrior at the same time,” Holguin told the Pilot the day before the event. “We’ve got lights, a big sound system, a disco ball, a PA system and I’ll be announcing all this, and we’re going to give these kids an experience like they’d see on TV.”
For the course, kids started on the quintuple steps, a set of five slanted boards the competitors had to jump back and forth on. They then grabbed a ring and swung down a slack-line hanging several feet off the ground.
From there they took on “cannonball alley,” grabbing hanging obstacles like a baseball and a banana-shaped object and swinging from one to the other. After a quick log-rolling lookalike obstacle, they grabbed onto another slack-line, this time higher, and crawled upside-down to the next objective.
After climbing up and over a rock wall, kids climbed a knotted-rope up to the finish line, touching a black-taped box at the top of another rock wall.
Following the competition, the young warriors gathered to listen to a talk given by the two coaches on self-esteem and bullying.
Curiosity about the obstacle courses is what got Holguin into Ninja Warrior in the first place.
He said one day he was flipping through channels on TV when he started watching the show, which he’d seen a few times before.
This time, however, he kept having thoughts of, “I can do that,” and soon after he was signed up and training for try-outs.
When he got to his first competition, he was surprised to see the way kids in the audience looked up to him. Holguin recalled the show’s announcer telling him about a group of kids that wanted to meet him, something he wasn’t expecting at all.
“When I first started, I didn’t realize it but this show has an amazing impact on kids, and I think that draws me in the most,” Holguin said. “I see the impact it has. And I wanted to be able to replicate that impact here in Montana. That got the wheels turning for me, ‘OK, how can I bring that big-stage experience, performance here?’”
Holguin’s solution was Ninja Kids, a Kalispell-based clubs for kids aged 7-11 years old. Initially the club just focused on the fun obstacle races that they see on TV in the real American Ninja Warrior show.
Soon after starting, Holguin said he realized he could do more with Ninja Kids.
“What I found, talking to the parents, is that the kids I was attracting were kids that were struggling in school with bullies, confidence, self-esteem, so I thought at that point, ‘How can we transition into something that’s not just a daycare?’” he said. “I had a similar experience, as most kids do, with being bullied, and just lacking self worth in my entire life and not really having my Pops around a lot, so I was able to relay a lot of my own stories into my lessons.”
This was the first event of its kind at Rockfish, but Holguin said there’s already talk of doing another Ninja Climber camp soon after.
Holguin is happy if the camp takes off and gets kids more interested in Nina Warrior, but for him, it’s not about popularity.
“I just want people to understand that this isn’t just something we’re doing to make a little bit of money once and be done with it,” he said. “The reason that we’re doing it is because I know for a fact kids in the Valley love Ninja Warrior and have never really seen or done anything like it before, so I just want people to know we’re trying to bring that big stage feel to Montana so kids can experience that.”