Little Rock climber launches nonprofit to inspire kids to enter the sport.

By Dwain Hebda

It is often said of people who are unlikely candidates for their career or avocation, “They didn’t choose it, it chose them.”

For Sharon Bennett, “it” is climbing. Though the mother and software implementation professional now pursues the activity with gusto, such was not always the case. In fact, climbing might still be the furthest thing from her interests except for some undeniable twists of fate that drew her to the rock.

Today, Bennett is unwilling to believe anything is impossible, even the lofty goals she holds for the growth of the organization she’s brought to Arkansas, the American Scholastic Climbing League.

“If there’s one thing about me, I will go all in,” she said. “I will double down when I believe in something.”

Bennett’s connection to climbing is so personal, it is hard to see where she begins and the activity ends. The love affair started when her son, Tristan, then about 6, saw the seminal climbing movie “Free Solo” and started bugging his mother about wanting to learn how to do what he saw on the screen.

“He wasn’t particularly interested in the climbing aspect, but more like how this man mastered his fear of heights,” she said. “So, I set out on this journey with my son, getting him introduced to climbing and overcoming his fear of heights and feeling like he had a sense of achievement. It’s been amazing.”

Bennett connected with the Little Rock Climbing Center and its then-owner, the late Logan Wilcoxon. He paired Tristan, who’s on the autism spectrum, with climbing coach Daniel Carnahan. Carnahan was the perfect mentor for the lad, having developed a reputation for working with kids needing extra attention and handling. Bennett became fast friends with the two men, as well as increasingly impressed by climbing’s benefits and community.

By the time Tristan moved on to other interests as a teen, Bennett had warmed to the sport, but it wasn’t until 2021 and Wilcoxon’s passing that she became addicted to the climb. Dealing with profound grief over Wilcoxon’s death and seeking a way to honor her friend, she resolved to enter the notorious 24 Hours of Horseshoe Hell in 2022, completing the 12-hour course in tribute. She did the same in 2023, feeding off the support of others.

“It started out kind of as a tribute to [Wilcoxon] but it very much became my own journey once I realized the community and the attributes it brought to my own life,” she said. “During that grief process, my community meant so much to me, both my ultra running community and the climbing community. I found such great support with them within those two areas and it became more important.”

Combining her love for climbing with her passion for volunteering, Bennett became part of the Arkansas Climbers Coalition, a foundation Wilcoxon started, wanting to grow the climbing community by promoting the benefits of the activity.

“I spend an enormous amount of time volunteering,” she said. “It’s the thing that I enjoy most in life and I teach my child the same service to community and how that’s important not only for us as individuals, but for the care that we give others. It is a fundamental kind of principle I bring to my work community, my friendships and my recreational communities.

“There were a couple people I have met through the process that were, like, ‘It would be so great if we had an alternative to sports in schools. It would be so awesome if we had climbing leagues.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, it absolutely would be awesome.’”

Researching for an answer, Bennett learned of the Colorado-based American Scholastic Climbing League. She initially resisted taking the lead on forming an Arkansas chapter, but eventually caved and is now running full-speed to promote and build the group and its mission of introducing climbing to young audiences.

“This will be a club that’s administered through schools,” she said. “It is for climbers from sixth grade to 12th grade who would be participants of a noncompetitive league. When I say noncompetitive, we will have competitions but the goal isn’t to push children to be these crushing kinds of climbers like you might see in Olympic climbing. This is simply to engage children on their journey of climbing and to let them experience that joy of discovering what they can do while providing them guidance.

“We’re taking them through the climbing process. It’s them against the wall. It’s them against the problem and it’s a puzzle for them to solve, and to watch them grow in their knowledge and provide mentorship.”

Bennett is putting her own little twist on the program, to help youngsters hone basic skills while the network of school-based programs gets established.

“We have foregone a ’23-24 season but are ramping up for the ’24-25 season, mostly because I didn’t want to rush this and I wanted to make sure that we had a strong foundation as we approached this project because that’s important to me,” she said.

“One thing I’m doing here that’s different is I am working to secure grants to make this a free program for children who qualify. That means they would have a 6-month gym membership to a local gym, they would have gear to participate and we would pay any sort of administrative fees to participate within the club.”

Having seen what climbing has done for her own child, as well as helping her work through her own grief, Bennett is committed to spreading the benefits of climbing from one end of the state to the other.

“What I see is us working with schools to obtain funding to get climbing walls in the gyms there so kids can practice and we can have participants from all over the state of Arkansas,” she said. “My goal with this is to truly remove access barriers to climbing for everyone.”