CrossFit Athletic Group

This may come as a surprise to you, but Mr. Gjon was talking one day over the Summer.

In the mix of all those words he said something that made me hesitate at the time, but the more I thought about it every day the more I believed it to be true. This post going to take us on a long roundabout trip that covers things like Cecilia Steinwascher, College Football, more Cecilia Steinwascher, and navy beans before we finally get to what Mr. Gjon said, so if you want to just skip towards the end, feel free. But in the immediate aftermath of Mr. Gjon telling me an unagreed-upon but much-needed opinion I was distracted by what was going on around the rest of the gym.

It was 11:25 on that Summer Monday and our 11 am session was about 7 minutes away from starting, which was actually quite an early start compared to most days. Our 10 am session studs had recently finished their workout and I was allowing time for the Monkey Exhibit to escape captivity yet again. But mixed in with the Monkeys was a healthy chunk of our 10 am session carried over to partake in the wonderful chaos: Aaron Sexton was playing basketball with Mr. Andrew, Mr. Bettys, and Mr. Mark, Luke and Dylan were chasing Calan around in an attempted capture, both running faster than they had in the workout, and Cecilia was answering a bombardment of questions from Lulu, Conamora, Sam Curtis, and the rest of the soccer minions. (Sarah Curtis and Jaylee were too cool for all of that and kept to hitting the volleyball by themselves.)

This was the scene every single day during the half hour of time that technically didn't exist but somehow did between the 10 am and 11 am session. Rookie session standout Josh Backos recently said, "I swear it's like time doesn't exist in here."

If you squint really hard, ignore Calan draping all over your heels, and borrow Mr. Gjon's noise-cancelling headphones he uses to block out soccer parents and ironically use them on him, you would be able to see that the environment produced by our athletic sub-culture can be traced back to a single seed from which everything else slowly, then very rapidly, grew. Oddly enough, this entire community of young athletes we love would look unrecognizable if there was one fundamental thing different about that particular seed. And it goes a little something like this:

What if Cecilia Steinwascher was an asshole?

I'm not talking that switch that gets flipped the instant she is competing at something, but I'm talking about if she was genuinely an energy drain on the people around her. And actually, it doesn't even have to be that. What if Cec was just really quiet and kept to herself? What if she was a 2-times-a-week kid? What if she was the lunchlady from the SNL skit, spending most of her energy on other stuff and giving us the same leftover meatloaf in a variety of desultory combinations. But instead she was, and continues to be, the complete opposite: she got Owen and Caitlin O'Malley to talk, she averaged 85% and 7th place in attendance, and she has put everything else on hold to make the Champions Club the top of the hierarchy every Summer. She bought into ideas like a lot of speed can actually be taught, that "chronic" injuries can be overcome with consistent maintenance, that a global pandemic can be an excellent opportunity to really work on the limiting factor, and that a CrossFit gym can be electric if it's treated like a sports team. As the years have progressed, Cecilia Steinwascher has shown herself to be about as good and accessible of a role model as any of our younger athletes could hope for.

When trying to build a program (not just a single team but an infinite cycles of teams) the culture and environment matters just as much as the players. Schools like Clemson, for example, are notorious for filling a lot of their roster with middle-of-the-pack guys who willing to buy in and work uncommonly hard to become good, and then when it is time to bring in the bigtime prospect the environment is already set.

As I mentioned in The Sports Post, basketball has taught me that not everyone is equal. Athletes are different based on God-given gifts, physical ability, intelligence, experience, and influence. In most settings I've observed, it's usually the best players who have the most influence; that's why coaches are so thankful when their star player is also the star hard-worker and star supporter of teammates. 

Cecilia takes this a step further. She got her first college soccer offer as a 7th grader, she has a D-II national championship, she has more All-American awards than she has fingers, and she will have an opportunity to be a professional if that's the route she wants. It would be very easy for her to isolate from the group, ask for private sessions, and keep her success to herself. Yet, this has never been her thing. You would never know she was a great soccer player if other people didn't talk about her all the time.

It's going to be difficult for me to not over-sell Cecilia's achievements going forward. On one hand, I'm so energized to share how doing things a certain way can set up for long-term development, but on the other hand, "Hey you should really give yourself an off-season because look what Cec did" is not a valid reason; Cecilia is who she is because she's been blessed with 1) her parents and 2) a competitive nature that defines her. Credibility is best gained on a person-to-person basis. But what Cecilia has done is very simple: she set a standard for a high-end college athlete.

And this is where Mr. Gjon comes in.

"At first I thought the young kids make this place special," he said on that Summer morning. "But the more I'm around here, the more I realize it's actually the college-aged kids like Shakes, Aaron, Cecilia, Luke, Jay, and Bubs that make this place special. That age group really has the potential to come off as entitled, but literally all our college-aged kids are just flat-out incredible people! I am so impressed with them!"

Everyone thinks young kids are cool; come around our Babies sessions on Sundays and you'll see that in the form of a Johnny J smiling faceplant into the blue beanbag. But somewhere along the way the Babies pick up things around them that come off as negative character traits. Everybody goes through this to some extent and it is especially noticeable in athletes who experience a lot of success early on.

The longer the Champions Club exists the more we are going to be introduced to high-end athletes in their respective sports. We probably have a few now. During lockdown I kept thinking, "Mrs. Van and Evan need to meet Cecilia's standard." They, and the rest of you, have done just that. Now I'm thinking, "the next Cecilia coming in needs to meet Mrs. Van and Evan's standard." It won't be the high-end kid doing their thing over there while the rest of us Muggles do our thing over here. There is only one way forward for them: the "Cecilia Way" will just eventually become the "Only Way." I am proud to have her name in the banners representing the dedicated athletes of Champions Club past, and everyone currently calling this place their home. This is not a situation where an NBA player buys an AAU team, names it after himself to jump-start the reputation, and then is nowhere to be seen; this is what Brad Beal did for the St. Louis Hawks. Cecilia is truly one of us, and we are truly part of her.