CrossFit Athletic Group

A few years ago one of my basketball coaches was talking to me about the rate at which players and coaches improve, and he brought up three questions he asks himself and those he coaches:

• Do you want to grow?
• Are you prepared for growth?
• Can you handle growth?

He also tied this in to the 3rd Agreement, which is Don't Make Assumptions. In his case, trying to push a kid to develop as a leader might not be the right thing to do if that kid won't be able to handle what comes with it... or if he doesn't want to grow in that way at all. This is something I keep in mind with myself frequently, but even more so that needs to be the case when coaching all of you.

...........

Poor damn Mrs. Colleen. Of all the new moms that have come through in the past four years, only Mrs. Goga might be able to claim I was harder on her during the first 4 months. Mrs. Colleen failed the box-checking assignment on team sports: she was a dancer growing up. She came in with a history of knee injuries that would test her patience. She is a "chronic thinker." And with three little demon babies trailing her to the gym, turning off the mom switch proved to be difficult.

Now let me tell you what happened on Wednesday.

Our 3:30 session was outside practicing technique for clean and jerks: Aaron, the Hills, Mr. Lett, Emma freaking Lang, and Mrs. Nevarez were among the 12 people outside sweating their butts off with an empty bar and PVC pipe when all of a sudden *CRASH* *CLANK* *THUD* *SPLACK* came from inside the gym. There was no possibility of it coming from anything other than Myla, Ainsley, or Sophia; no other Babies were inside and Mr. Gjon wasn't at the session. I looked at Aaron: we struggled to hang up the shelf with Abmats and PVC pipes the night before Summer, and it was fair to guess one of the Babies reached and pulled it down on accident.

Mrs. Hill ran inside.

Jessica craned her neck to see what happened.

Emma Lang said, "bad boy."

Mrs. Colleen, as the scouting report predicted, went absolutely ballistic! She shrieked like a banshee, started flailing her arms around hollering something about a lawsuit, and ran in faster than I've seen her run any 200 to cure the injured children with kisses for their boo-boos.

Except the scouting report was dead wrong.

She didn't do any of that. She just kinda kept doing clean and jerks. I think her glasses might have slid down her nose a bit, so maybe we could deduct some points there, but otherwise she did absolutely nothing. I think either I broke Mrs. Colleen, or she broke herself, not sure which one yet.

One thing I am perfectly convinced of is the that Mrs. Colleen's time to give Mrs. Colleen time is right freaking now. There has been plenty of opportunity to throw off her Athlete game and drag her back into Mom game, whether it's Myla's mid-session potty-training, unexpected field trips, Ainsley wraastling with Mr. Kuiper, or Sophia's routine habit to be juuuuuuust not quite out of the way enough to make us wonder if she's really safe where she is. And yet during a time where plenty of people would surrender to the demands of being a parent, Mrs. Colleen has locked in one hour a day to not only work on her physical fitness, but her mental strength and resilience as well. Mrs. Colleen wants to grow, plain and simple, and the Champions Club is better off because of it.