Rebuild 2021827

Prebuild Notes

by Alan Tran on September 20th, 2021

World Chase Tag has made an impact on parkour athletes and how they train and play in purpose-built environments. It’s been interesting watching elite practitioners change their primary focus from overcoming challenges to tag’s reach and escape. Professional tag has also caught the eyes of our students. Our coaching team has implemented many new exercises and drills to equip students with chase-tag skills. This next rebuild is a reflection on the World Chase Tag’s arena known as The Quad. 

Experienced coach-athletes have asked for continued linear cuts that challenge crossing-movement to be under or over. The Quad’s full visibility will be hard to replicate with many of our large and obtuse obstacles along with the unique structures exclusive to its field-of-play. We do note that The Quad is an unique arena purpose-built for a specific type of competition whereas our space is designed for parkour and movement instruction. 

Public space and city centers will be the source of inspiration for the upcoming rebuild. These spaces are often centered around large open and green spaces that offer functional features for movement of people, transportation, and commerce. I’ll work to compound these systems scaled to this rebuild with tag as a focus.

Our Process

How to Understand this On-going Project

Every Rebuild is a documented process of three steps: inspiration, design, and create. It’s our approach for breaking down and reinventing our parkour spaces throughout the year to freshen up our facilities. During each Rebuild, we define the steps needed to tackle the project and hold onto ideas that will spark inspiration.

Step 01 | Inspiration can be traced back to the Latin “inspirare” meaning “to breathe.” In a figurative sense, inspire has come to mean “to influence, move, or guide,” imparting a reason to the human soul. Whatever the source of inspiration may be, we begin the process influenced by an idea to give way for thinking and feeling. See inspiration as our data collection stage.

Step 02 | The planning stage is design; involving how a Rebuild can be conceived as a usable play space. We take a hard look at functionality, inner workings, and concepts to anticipate the needs of changing something into existence. This is where we start to make an understanding of all the data and information collected during the inspiration stage. Most often, we’ll prototype through sketches or small 3D-printed models.

Step 03 | Create is the act of making the Rebuild design into being, evolved from one’s imagination, as a unique work of art. Every creative process presents new constraints that challenge how our build team feels and thinks. During this stage, we’ll alter and refine the design to ensure human movement can be safe for playing, training, and exercising on the structures. When we get to the end product, the  structures are rigorously tested internally before we expand the space for movement practitioners and athletes.

After implementing and building the new Rebuild, the team always takes time to observe its effectiveness, gather feedback from students and coaches, and reflect on how we can improve. We take any meaningful solutions back to the drawing board for refining and clarifying to deepen our knowledge and wisdom in designing movement play spaces.

World Chase Tag is an international tag competition that involves competitive parkour athletes. The competition is contested on a fixed arena, known as The Quad, in a one versus one match. The Quad are a number of unique obstacles dispersed throughout the field of play including The Frontline, The Loading Bay, The Mountain, The Ridge, The Sisters, and The Tilted Cube. Players of two opposing teams compete in twenty-second rounds; the team with the most points out of sixteen rounds wins the event. 

Tag is a common childhood pastime that seems to have deeper roots beyond our natural human instincts – gorillas have been observed to play tag, too! This type of play gives individuals the space to respond to inequity by forming an unequal situation. One person gets to hit while the other person doesn’t. As coaches, we have found that the simple game can teach us how different people judge how rough they play and make decisions. Some kids play harder than others, some don’t like being “it,” and some don’t play by the rules at all! Whatever the case, tag can be a great learning opportunity for everyone to better judge their social situations and to adjust accordingly. Especially when we can take a hard look and reflect on the wins and losses as players or with students.

The Mountain is a unique component of The Quad and serves as a rear-center obstacle. We could imagine its name is influenced by the three inclines that peak to two parallel, flat panels. Both panels are around head-height; with a waist-height bar under the right side. Players can approach below with underbars, ground slides, rolls, or vaults. The Mountain can also be taken above with strides. Generally, we’ve seen the athletes transition underneath. 

Our takeaway from The Quad is designing an obstacle-dense environment of scaffolding that is centered around an open perimeter. This approach leaves open visibility for tag players while in the “arena.” 

Rebuild 20211027

Reflection Notes

Rebuild 20210827 has been one of my favorite spaces to play in. The design has complex layers for a variety of parkour movement and challenges from tight swings, large precisions, to plenty of vaulting skills. It’s a high density build that has given classes a great refreshing look at how we can play in the gym. The goals set by many of our intermediate and advanced students have been gnarly.

The biggest challenge for the team during the create stage was stacking one large obstacle onto another – specifically Lemonade Stand onto Sauron. Ben was able to help create leverage with bars for four of us lift and stack the 400lb+ Lemonade Stand. We are not looking forward to taking down the obstacle. 

Tag has influenced the design and the coaching tools for this quarter. It’s taught the team a few new drills to develop the evasion skills demonstrated masterfully through World Chase Tag. There is some newfound appreciation for the trending sport as a non-competitive adult practitioner that has little to no experience playing tag. Interestingly as I give space for our students to enjoy and play competitive tag, I’ve learned many things along the way.