This past Sunday, five of Flying Frog’s advanced parkour students traveled to The Haven, a parkour gym in the Sacramento area, to take part in a youth parkour competition. This was the first in a series of three competitions organized between Flying Frog, The Haven, and Sessions Academy of Movement in San Jose. Coaches from each gym invited students to compete who had demonstrated the skill, control, and maturity needed to do so safely – roughly 40 students between the ages of 8 and 17 competed.
As Coach Christian explains, close friends training together and pushing each other has driven the development of parkour throughout its history. He sees this series as an extension of that friendly competition, and as a way to introduce Flying Frog’s younger students to the larger parkour community in the Bay Area.
Organized parkour competitions for teens and adults have become more common over the last ten years, but youth competitions are still new. This is one of the first times where several gyms within an area have teamed up to form a competitive youth league.
Each competition has three categories – skill, speed, and style.
“What we do in class is most similar to a skill competition, and that’s how most people train,” Coach Christian says. “A challenge is put in front of you, and you’re trying to accomplish that challenge.” Once students reach an appropriate skill level, they can begin to approach those challenges differently – with a goal of accomplishing them within a certain number of attempts, or even on their first try.
In a speed competition, participants focus on efficient movement to get from one point to another in the shortest time possible.
Style has not been a major focus for Flying Frog’s parkour classes in the past, but the competition prompted Coach Christian to incorporate style elements in his advanced youth and teen classes. Students practiced creating their own parkour line or run, incorporating movements that are challenging to them, and working on connections between those movements.
“It’s great to practice parkour non-competitively,” Coach Christian says, “but for those who want to compete and treat it like a sport, this gives them an opportunity to try it out.”
Preparing for and participating in a competition can also give a new focus to students’ training. In exploring these different approaches to parkour, students can identify areas they especially enjoy, and new directions in which they may want to take their training.
Coach Christian says of Sunday’s competition, “It’s cool to see how far a lot of the kids have come, and how little help they needed from their coaches to navigate the obstacles, progress up to skills safely, and create their own runs in the style competition. It’s a really good sign for future parkour generations – it shows these kids are parkour athletes.”
Flying Frog will be hosting the next competition in the series, scheduled for Sunday, March 3rd. Keep an eye out for more details!
