CrossFit Athletic Group

As a pale young lad with more down time than was ideal for a serious basketball player, I found two main outlets for non-sports entertainment: Pokemon and Harry Potter. Both came out at almost exactly the same time and caught my generation in a craze. 20 years later and I still like Pokemon a lot, mainly because of the nostalgia. But I love Harry Potter. The series grew up with the readers; Ash Ketchum is still pussyfooting around with gotdamn Team Rocket and never gave Pikachu the Thunderstone.

tf is Pikachu doing in a picture with Lucario, Cinderace, and Mew?

The best thing I learned from my English teachers in college was how to write about one thing and make it relate to another thing. I do it at the beginning of most longer posts. The second best thing I learned from my teachers was how to keep the concept of a "target audience" constantly on my mind. I actually wrote about it in The Bus Won't Leave Without Him:

The idea of having a target audience comes from writing and has to do with a general population the author wants to appeal to. Things that are written for "everyone" generally suck and are boring. Dictionaries are written for everyone and nobody reads dictionaries. But picking a target audience is difficult because it comes with the prerequesite of being able to say no. A lot. In fact, for every 1 target audience you say yes to there's 10 that are ignored. You, your product, and your values are not for everyone. That is perfectly okay.

The longer I've let that principle linger, the more opportunities I've had to apply it to, and the more it helps me understand what I am seeing in front of me. CrossFit, for example, made a pretty drastic shift in their website and general direction as a company in 2019; their target audience was, as Coach put it, "10-year affiliates, doctors working out in the boxes, and anyone else with a brain." I didn't qualify under any of those at the time, but I worked harder to be included in two of those categories. Now, under new ownership, the content is geared towards a different crowd.

I currently coach two groups of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grader basketball players; one of them has future pros in it, one of them has Evan, Josh Van, Cecilia, and Dillon Sharp learning what a pivot is 30 seconds before teaching it. I've had parents ask me to slow down the teaching at The Family's practices, and I've had parents ask me to speed up the teaching at the Warren Rec camp. My answer to both is the same: your kid is not the target audience.

In the frame of the Champions Club, everything has a target audience. For whatever reason, I had Mrs. Van and Arthur on my mind when I wrote this post; Mrs. Van is the target audience for most workouts, Arthur's gotta catch up. The 3-on-1-off schedule has a target audience. The session dynamics - not sure what that means but it sounds cool - have a target audience. And so do the monthly payments. One person might feel "included" on one thing and "left out" of another. Being aware of that in our community will help you translate that to other frames as well. And if you're looking for a conclusion to this post that ties everything back to the beginning, please don't be disappointed: you are not the target audience.