CWA Blog Archive-Diversity = Variety What Does It Mean For Commercial Routesetting

Diversity = Variety What Does It Mean For Commercial Routesetting

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This interview with Sean Nanos, Touchstone Climbing's Head Routesetter for all of Southern California, explores what diversity means in commercial routesetting and why it matters for the member experience. The framing establishes routesetting as central to every gym's end users, its members: routes that are challenging but varied are one reason climbers keep coming back, so keeping diversity in mind while building a setting team and developing a setting program is crucial to providing the best customer experience. Nanos brings a strong background, having discovered climbing at boarding school in New Hampshire, started setting after moving to Oakland, and risen to foreman at San Francisco's Dogpatch Boulders before taking his current Southern California role. Asked about the meanings of diversity in routesetting, Nanos gives a comprehensive answer: the most tangible meanings are size (including weight, height, and ape index), age, gender, race/ethnicity, climbing ability, experience, and style. This broad definition establishes that diversity spans many dimensions, physical, demographic, and stylistic. Asked why diversity in routesetting is important, he begins to explain (the text continues, connecting diverse setters to the varied routes that serve a diverse membership). The throughline is that diversity in commercial routesetting, understood broadly across size, age, gender, race, ability, experience, and style, equals the variety that keeps members engaged and coming back, making a diverse setting team essential to the member experience. Because routesetting is central to why members climb at a gym, and because varied, challenging routes drive retention, gyms must deliberately build diversity into both their setting teams and their setting programs. Nanos's expansive definition of diversity, encompassing not just demographics but physical attributes like height and ape index, plus climbing ability, experience, and style, reframes diversity as fundamentally about the range of perspectives and bodies that produce varied movement. A crew diverse across these dimensions naturally sets a wider variety of routes, serving the full spectrum of a gym's members rather than a narrow slice. For operators and head setters, the interview argues that diversity equals variety in practical terms: assembling setters diverse in size, background, ability, and style directly produces the route variety that provides the best member experience and keeps climbers returning, positioning setting-team diversity as a business and quality imperative central to commercial success.

Asset Caption

An interview with Touchstone's SoCal Head Routesetter Sean Nanos on diversity in commercial routesetting. He defines it broadly, size (height, weight, ape index), age, gender, race, ability, experience, and style, and argues a crew diverse across these dimensions produces the route variety that serves all members and keeps climbers coming back. Diversity equals variety.