USA Climbing: Athletes Step Up to Defend Their Future National Training Center

Accused by some private gym operators of being too commercial, the future National Training Center in Salt Lake City has become a flashpoint. Now USA Climbing’s athlete commission has finally broken its silence. In an open letter and in comments to Vertige Media, American climbers are presenting a united front: this facility is essential if the sport is going to build real structure and keep pushing U.S. climbing to the top.

Climbing World Cup in Chamonix © David Pillet

Up to now, the back-and-forth over the future National Training Center, or NTC, had one glaring omission. In one corner were private gym owners, openly hostile to what they saw as an overly commercial project for a national governing body. In the other was USA Climbing, defending a hybrid model built around high performance, public access, events, and long-term financial viability. Caught in the middle of that fight were the people most directly affected by it, and until now, they had largely been absent from the conversation.

That is no longer the case.

Through its athlete commission, chaired by Danny Popowski, Team USA’s climbers have made their position clear. The tone, first laid out in an open letter and then expanded on in an exchange with Vertige Media, is firm. The NTC is not a luxury. It is an urgent need. In the commission’s words, it is “needed to help make the US more competitive on the international stage, to have a dedicated event stage, and to provide education and development opportunities for our broader community.” The athletes go even further, calling it “foundational to athlete development and the continued growth of competition climbing in the United States.”

The point of speaking out was not just to endorse the project. It was also to change the way people are talking about it. Forget the idea that this is just another climbing gym about to crowd an already busy Utah market. In the athletes’ view, the center is first and foremost a response to a major infrastructure gap, and to years of making do with whatever the sport could piece together.

Out of the garage

That is really the core of their case. Behind the medals and podiums, American high-performance climbing has long relied on a patchwork system. As the letter puts it plainly, the U.S. team has succeeded up to this point “without a permanent, purpose-built training facility.” The next line lands even harder. To prepare, American climbers have depended on “borrowed gym time, temporary warehouse setups, and personal resourcefulness.”

In its conversation with Vertige Media, a commission spokesperson drove the point home. Private gyms have historically carried the sport in the U.S., they said, but those facilities “are not designed to consistently replicate international competition environments.” The list of shortcomings is both specific and hard to argue with: wall angles that do not match modern comp climbing, route turnover that is too slow, and event builds that fall short of the world standard. Even now, some qualifiers and national-level events are still being held on structures that do not reflect what athletes face internationally. Lead walls are often missing the kind of steep terrain now standard at the top level. Bouldering walls can lack a real range of angles, “particularly true slab,” meaning low-angle, balance-heavy terrain. And speed climbing remains chronically underserved. On that front, access to four-lane speed walls is still “extremely limited,” which is a striking gap at a moment when the discipline is continuing to evolve worldwide.

“It is not designed to serve the same purpose as a typical commercial gym”

Danny Popowski, Chair USA Climbing Athletes' Commission

What this intervention really shows is a clash between two very different readings of the same project. Where private operators see commercial overreach, athletes see a long-standing structural deficit. For them, the U.S. has simply been missing a true home base, one capable of absorbing the technical, logistical, and symbolic demands of elite performance over the long term.

Built to produce champions

That is also the argument athletes are using to push back against the private-sector revolt. Yes, the NTC will be open to the public. But calling it a standard commercial gym, they argue, misses the point by a mile. “The primary focus is on competition-style climbing,” the commission says. This is not a facility designed to maximize density or squeeze in as many members as possible. The terrain will be “more specialized, less dense, and frequently reset,” including entire areas that can be closed off for weeks at a time for national-team training or events. Their conclusion is blunt: “It is not designed to serve the same purpose as a typical commercial gym.”

“As athletes, we just want to see the project handled in a way that builds trust across the sport”

Danny Popowski, Chair USA Climbing Athletes' Commission

The defense is straightforward. The NTC should not be seen as just a bigger gym backed by a national federation. It is meant to be a performance lab with a public-facing side. But the athletes are just as clear that they do not want it to become an ivory tower. “From our perspective, it’s important that this isn’t just a closed-off, national team facility,” the signers write. In a country where climbing grew through openness and broad access, they argue that a project of this scale needs to carry “that same standard of accessibility and openness in some capacity.”

That goes beyond a political talking point. It gets at something deeper in the American sports model. Rather than an elite bunker, the center is being pitched as a hub, a place where young prospects, coaches, setters, para-climbing specialists, and recreational climbers could all cross paths. The letter points to a whole network of possible uses: talent ID sessions, coach education, and stronger development pathways across the sport. In that sense, the NTC is being sold as both a champion-building machine and a central node for the broader climbing community. It is also a much easier vision to defend politically when the price tag comes up.

The elephant in the room

But that is also where the athletes’ case runs into its clearest limit.

Because the anger from private gym operators has never really been about whether the project would help athletes. The real issue is the hybrid business model, and whether a federation should be stepping into a space that private operators already occupy. On that question, the commission has very little to say. Asked where the line sits between financial sustainability and direct competition with commercial gyms, the athletes declined to engage, responding with a brief: “No comment.”

That silence matters. It does not undercut the legitimacy of their sporting concerns. But it does confirm that athletes are not the ones trying to solve the financial side of this fight. The open letter says as much, acknowledging that the team is “not in a position to speak to business projections or operating models.” Their expertise, they argue, is narrower and more specific: whether the facility is the right tool for performance, development, and the competition calendar. In other words, everybody has their lane. The private-sector backlash is not dismissed, but the message is clear enough: do not sacrifice our training environment to settle somebody else’s business dispute.

“From an athlete perspective, it feels more complementary than competitive”

Danny Popowski, Chair USA Climbing Athletes' Commission

On governance, the commission is a little more forthcoming, though still careful. Can USA Climbing be both regulator and market actor if it is involved in running a public-facing facility? Here the athletes point to Momentum. The fact that the private operator was chosen to run the NTC is, in their view, “an important step” toward easing concerns. Handing the keys to an experienced outside operator was, as they understand it, “the responsible way to bring the NTC to operational status.”

It is a smart way to shift the argument. Outsourcing, in this framing, acts as a kind of firewall, though only if the process remains above reproach. “Transparency and continued engagement with the community are going to matter,” the athletes say, before landing on the key word of their entire intervention: “As athletes, we just want to see the project handled in a way that builds trust across the sport.” That is not a throwaway line. Trust is exactly what starts to erode when a federation moves from being a referee to becoming an economic player.

Still, this is not a blank check. While support for the NTC is described as “strong” within the team, and feedback to the commission as “overwhelmingly positive,” concerns do remain. The biggest one is the risk of funneling too many resources into Salt Lake City at the expense of the rest of the country. That nuance matters. It keeps the commission from sounding like a simple mouthpiece for the federation. The athletes’ point is not that criticism should disappear. It is that criticism should push the project’s backers to think harder about governance and national relevance, not kill the center outright.

As for the charge of unfair competition, the team answers with a kind of trickle-down sports argument. In their view, greater visibility for elite climbing will eventually benefit the base of the sport. “From an athlete perspective, it feels more complementary than competitive”, they say. The bet is clear enough: a high-profile NTC will attract major events, create exposure, bring more people into the sport, and eventually drive some of those newcomers into local gyms. It is an optimistic theory, but at least it makes the logic of the project explicit.

In the end, this public intervention does not resolve the core conflict. What it does do is change the story around it. Where private operators had framed the NTC as an economic aberration, athletes are insisting that it is first and foremost a response to a sporting shortfall. That kind of ground-level legitimacy is something no federation FAQ could ever manufacture. These are climbers who came up grinding through borrowed wall time, improvised setups, and whatever resources they could scrape together. They do not want the next generation to have to do the same. The closing lines of their letter read like a handoff: “The National Training Center is that same kind of investment, made permanent by USA Climbing in ways we never could have believed growing up, and made available to every athlete who comes next.”

Still, athlete testimony has its limits. It may now be harder to reduce the NTC to a simple real estate play, but their case does not answer the founding question at the heart of this fight: how does a federation build stronger infrastructure without draining the private ecosystem that helped make the sport what it is? That question remains unresolved. But what started as a two-sided clash between an ambitious federation and anxious gym operators has now become a three-way contest. On the same wall, management logic, market reality, and athlete needs are now colliding in full view. And as is often the case in fights like this, everybody is at least a little bit right, just not in the same place.