Tyson Schoene Built Vertical World's Climbing Pipeline

Seattle Fitness Magazine · 2 Oct 2026

• 100+team members
• 7athletes in 2002
• 2team training gyms

Tyson Schoene has coached one gym for nearly twenty years

Tyson Schoene has run the Vertical World Climbing Team, which started in Redmond in 2002 with seven athletes on the roster.

The Nugget Climbing podcast profiled him in August 2020. It called his tenure nearly twenty years. The team now trains across two Vertical World locations with more than 100 members, and it has taken the Regional team title every year since it began.

Three climbers who came up through that program are Drew Ruana, Sean Bailey and Quinn Mason, and each has a record that traces back to the same gym.

A coaching philosophy built on repetition

On that same podcast, Schoene describes his method as treating competition itself as a training tool rather than the goal: kids climb in meets to get repetitions on movement under pressure, then bring that back to the wall. The base under all of it is traversing. He calls the efficiency work "ARCing."

Climbers drill it through heels-only climbing and a technique called "fives." None of that is new in 2020. A setter-community blog had already called Schoene "a longtime climber, competitor, and setter" running the team back in January 2012, eight years before the podcast interview, which puts him in the job for most of the span the program has existed.

Sean Bailey's record runs back to 2014

Sean Bailey was born in Shoreline in May 1996, and his record in USA Climbing's own database, filed under Vertical World, starts in 2014.

It does not let up. A national title in sport and speed lead came in 2018, another in bouldering in 2019, a second-place finish in bouldering in 2020, and a first at the National Team Trials in lead in 2021. Then came 2022.

He won the YETI National Championships in lead and took second in boulder, and by 2023 he was in Bern for the World Championships, placing seventh in lead. Bailey's path runs from Shoreline to a start list that includes the sport's best.

Quinn Mason built a parallel record

Quinn Mason's record in that same database starts in 2014, same as Bailey's.

It runs just as deep. She won the Youth Nationals lead and top-rope final in 2021, took third in boulder the same year, then won the YETI National Championship lead final and placed fourth in boulder.

In 2022 she took second in the YETI lead final, and by 2024 she placed third in lead and fourteenth in boulder at the same event. Mason came up through the broader program Schoene has directed, and her results sit next to Bailey's and Ruana's as evidence of what it has produced.

Drew Ruana's first ascent at Little Si

Drew Ruana started at three.

He joined Schoene's Vertical World team as a competitor at eight, according to a Gripped Magazine profile of his career. In October 2016, at eighteen, he made the first ascent of Brave New World at Little Si, off Exit 32, rating it 5.14d, or roughly 9a, the first route of that grade ever confirmed in Washington state. The line was bolted by Erich Sachs. He worked with Ruana on where the bolts went before Ruana made the send.

Ruana himself was unsentimental about it afterward, calling the route "contrived" because it strips the rest jugs off the neighboring New World Order and replaces them with crimps rated V8 and V9. How long it took is disputed. A post Sachs wrote the week of the ascent described a send that came together within months; a later profile put the number at 75 attempts, spread across several years.

The Regional title has never left Redmond

Three climbers. One coach.

Ruana's grade is written into the rock at Little Si. Bailey's and Mason's results sit in the governing body's own database — a full record anyone can check. What ties them together is simpler than any one result: Vertical World has held the Regional team title every year since its founding in 2002, and it still does.