Sarah
Sarah is a charity programme lead, climbing instructor and disability inclusion advocate.
Her brother Zac died in 2022.
After his death, Sarah created an inclusive accredited climbing scheme for disabled climbers.
“Climbing is creative movement. There’s lots of similarities with dance - people have their own style. I’m slow and soft I suppose, whereas I have friends who do really big moves.
Route-setting is an art form. You’ve got to be a creative person; think outside the box. There’s all the colours, the textures. You get to make patterns on the wall.
Climbing appeals to a lot of people who feel like they don’t fit in other sporting environments. There’s no team dynamics. And there’s a lot of failure: climbing is the only sport where you have to fail over and over again.
If you’re acing it all the time, you’re not pushing yourself, you’re not making progress. It reframes failure as necessary.
Zac was autistic. He also had a complex learning disability and health issues. On paper, he was non-verbal. Professionals would describe his behaviour as ‘challenging’.
For a long time, he didn’t do any sport. His daily activity was sitting at the window watching the buses go by. His world was really small. My parents were disabled too, so we never had any money to go anywhere or do anything.
But the first time he climbed, I just remember this look of pure joy on his face. To see somebody who was so restricted in every other element of his life be so free, laughing his head off…it was pivotal.
Zac was 18 when he died of SUDEP - Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy. He passed away at home. It came completely out of the blue. Losing him felt like losing a child.
It’s a bit of a blur. I remember going into support worker mode, like I was dealing with the death of someone at work. I wasn’t processing it at all.
At the time, I was a climbing instructor at a special school. Our accessible climbing sessions were just taking off when Zac died.
“I needed to channel my energy into something. I felt like it had to go somewhere useful. ”
He didn’t get to go very often - not because of a lack of ability, but because there weren’t many spaces that could provide the opportunity.
In the run-up to the funeral, I went into this hyper-focused flow state. I remember sitting on the floor with an A3 piece of paper and scribbling all these ideas down.
I needed to channel my energy into something. I felt like it had to go somewhere useful.
After the inquest, we received a full report. There was only one positive sentence about Zac in the whole thing.
This was a young lad who liked climbing and buses and trains. He was happy and loving and kind. He wasn’t an aggressive monster - people just didn’t know how to support him.
Three years after Zac’s death, we’ve created NICAS Ascend. It’s a disability inclusive climbing scheme built around lived experience. Disabled children have helped choose the criteria.
The human story - Zac’s story - has been kept at the forefront.
In the scheme log book, each skill area is represented by climbing hold stickers in different colours. When climbers achieve a goal, they place their hold sticker on the climbing wall page. As their skills develop, they create a sticker climbing route that’s completely unique to them.
There’s no time frame. We might do three or four floor-based sessions before we even get up on the wall. We don’t stick to prescribed routes. It gives climbers permission to rip up the rule book.
So many organisations claim to be accessible, but the truth is it’s often ‘accessible, but not for you’. To be truly inclusive, sometimes you have to get creative.
When I read the inquest report, I thought, ‘This is not the last thing that’s going to be written about Zac.’ It’s not the last word.
If you expect so little from someone, they’re never going to achieve. It’s been so cathartic to take that negative report and create something positive from it. ”