Meet the Board Lord, Sean Houchins-McCallum
If you visit Bluestem Boulders, a small gym in the 65,000-person town of Ames, Iowa, on any given evening, you’ll likely run into one of the nation’s best board climbers: Sean Houchins-McCallum. Not only does this 20-year-old former comp kid consistently top the Tension Board 2 leaderboard with over 600 sends, he’s also redefining what is possible in board climbing.
Houchins-McCallum’s climbing journey began as many of ours did: As an eight-year-old, he visited his local gym, Climb Iowa, for a birthday party, and was immediately hooked. He soon joined the climbing team, and at comps, he was drawn to the boulders with big laches and burly overhangs. “[During practice,] all I really did was make up random dynos, so I got really good at giant dynos and momentum generation,” Houchins-McCallum says.
For someone who now is obsessed with board climbing, Houchins-McCallum ironically hated the board the first time he tried it as part of a climbing team workout. Initially, it seemed boring and repetitive, but it soon became a necessity when his abilities surpassed what his gym could offer. Today, he says that the permanence and accessibility of the board are its greatest appeals: His project won’t be going anywhere, and there’s no travel or approach required.
When Bluestem Boulders opened last year, he got access to a Tension Board 2 for the first time. In a mere month and a half, Houchins-McCallum completed all 527 “classic” climbs up to V13 on the board. According to him, the team at the Tension company will deem a climb a “classic” if “it’s a good quality boulder, if the movement is good, and it’s solid for the grade.” Since his initial burst, Tension has added another 53 classics, which Houchins-McCallum has all sent in quick succession.
There are over 16,000 climbers on the logbook for the TB2, and Houchins-McCallum has been on top of the leaderboard for months. For context, he’s ranked above Olympians like Kyra Condie and Jesse Grupper, elite boulderers like Zach Galla and Noah Wheeler, and people like Will Anglin, a Tension employee who has set many of the board’s classic problems. The leaderboard is ranked by how many classics climbers do, so unless Tension adds more of them, Houchins-McCallum can do nothing but wait for other climbers to catch up. After our interview, in fact, another climber, Erik Cmiel, also put down all the classics, putting him side-by-side with Houchins-McCallum at the top.
Houchins-McCallum has also set and FA’d some of the board’s hardest climbs, including Non-Euclidean (V14 at 55°), Kronos Banished (V14 at 50°), and Evil Twin (V14 at 55°). His resume includes 40 V13s and 6 V14s. None of the V14s that Houchins-McCallum has FA’d have been repeated. A video of him twisting, spinning, and jumping through the air on Kronos Banished produced Instagram comments like “Dislocated both my shoulders watching this,” and “Sean has to be studied – how does one become this strong?” His distinctive gymnastic style features double clutches—dynoing to a hold and then immediately moving off of it to another hold—and cartwheeling 360s.
There is no V15 yet on the Tension Board app, but he’s got one in the works: You’ve Seen the Butcher. Houchins-McCallum is confident that at 65°, it is a “solid V15,” and definitely much harder than any V14 he’s done on the board. Butcher has eight ascents as a V13 at 55°, so he thinks adding ten more degrees of overhang will up the difficulty two grades. “It feels like just a huge step up from anything I’ve done,” he says. “I’ve tried it by far the most out of any TB2 climb, about 500 attempts, and I still feel like I have a lot of strength gains to make before I actually send it.” He’s done it successfully in two parts, and if it goes, it will establish a new level of difficulty in board climbing.
Houchins-McCallum is part of a growing culture of climbers who don’t climb on boards just to train or get stronger for outdoor climbing. “I board climb to be better at board climbing,” he says. “Even if a move on the board is never gonna be outside, I still think it’s cool.” For Houchins-McCallum and other board fanatics, outdoor climbing is a worthwhile style, but it’s not the be-all and end-all in climbing.
There is a whole corner of Instagram devoted to board climbing. For Houchins-McCallum, unsurprisingly, it’s the only thing that pops up in his feed. He regularly posts his sends—and fail compilations—to his 7,000 followers. “There are a lot of board accounts on Instagram now. I’m in multiple group chats with really strong, psyched board climbers,” Houchins-McCallum says. “Every day, we send each other clips of us doing random climbs to the chat.”
The universality of the board helps create connection: A climber in California, for example, can share and talk about a certain problem with a climber in Japan, as long as both have the same Tension Board 2. When Houchins-McCallum posts a video of him first ascending a V13, his board friends across the world can instantly throw it up on their board in their gym and give it a try. In April, when Houchins McCallum posted a video of him FAing 10,000 Days (V14 at 55°) in April, his comment section was filled with disbelieving athletes from around the world: “This boulder literally looks like someone said, ‘How many V10/V11 crux moves can we do in a row?’” (Ben Stanley, Oklahoma), “Hardest board climb, period? Gawwwwd damn,” (Jake Scharfman, British Columbia), and “Fame’s getting to his head. Put this man on some slab now,” (Elmir Ganibegovic, Iowa).
While board culture is boundary-pushing, Houchins-McCallum insists that there’s no boulder bro, agro-type energy. “It’s not really competitive at all … Every time someone sets a new boulder, it’s not a race to do it next or anything, it’s just like, ‘Oh, that’s another cool climb that we all want to do,’” he says.
If you were in doubt about just how devoted Houchins-McCallum is to board climbing, how he spends his weekend will convince you. The day after we chatted in May, he drove down to RoKC in Kansas City (a three-hour-drive each way) for the day just to climb on a Kilter Board. He only has access to a Tension Board 1 in Des Moines and a Tension Board 2 in Ames, and he relishes the chance to try other boards. For Houchins-McCallum, it’s totally normal to spend six hours in a car to try to climb one specific project on a board. (His Kilter Board project was Jellyfish (V14/V13 at 40°) and, yes, he sent it.)
This summer, Houchins-McCallum will take part in an essential component of board culture: Board Lord videos. This video series, produced by Tension Climbing, features strong climbers throwing down at Tension’s world-class facility in Denver, Colorado. It’s been compared to the Reel Rock for board climbers, and past participants include V16 and V17 boulderers Noah Wheeler, Colin Duffy, Zach Galla and Nathaniel Coleman.
Outdoor climbing isn’t the ultimate goal for Houchins-McCallum, but it’s definitely on his mind. As a full-time college student, he struggles to schedule outdoor trips around classes, particularly because living in Iowa means good, hard boulders are at least a day’s drive away. Over the last two spring breaks, he’s managed to visit Red Rocks and the Northeast, and now boasts quite a tick list: a single-session send of Echale (V14), Meadowlark Lemon (V14/V13), Child of the Storm (V13), Halcyon (V11), and a flash of Confident Man (V11). At the moment, his dream lines include Paint it Black (V15) and No One Mourns the Wicked (V17), both located in Colorado.
“Paint it Black really just looks like a board climb on a roof, which is my whole thing. It’s at 65°, maybe steeper, and only three or four moves,” he says. “It suits me pretty well.” Houchins-McCallum has one year left at Iowa State University, and once he’s graduated, it won’t be surprising if we see him go on a tear through some of the West’s hardest boulders.
For those who have never touched a Tension Board, trying it for the first time can be quite intimidating. It takes time to learn to attune your body to the board: how to best grasp the holds, where to place a toe on a foot chip, and how the different angles affect the required body tension. Houchins-McCallum is the ultimate advocate of just getting on the board, no matter what grade you climb. “There’s a perception that it’s just for boulderers, but I think sport climbers would really benefit from the board as well,” he says.
His biggest piece of advice is to moderate expectations and find small wins. As with any new style or training tool you try in climbing, there’s a learning curve. “If you’re climbing a lot lower grades on the board than you are in the gym, that’s fine. It would probably be weird if you weren’t. If you start board climbing and you climb harder than you did last week, or you do a move that you couldn’t do last week, that’s really good.”
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