Sports Are a Season.
Fitness Is a Lifestyle.

Michael Jordan got asked to shoot hoops with a couple of kids at an Airbnb. He said afterward that he'd never been more nervous shooting free throws in his life. He hadn't touched a basketball since he retired, and he didn't know if they were going to go in.

The greatest player who ever lived. Twenty-some years after the last whistle, and he's not sure about a free throw.

Nobody took his talent, though. What left was the reason. The season ended, the rings weren't the goal anymore, and the basketball stayed in the closet. The practice went away with the season, and the confidence went away with the practice.

The WhistleThe last whistle

I played high school football in Texas during the Friday Night Lights era. We took football seriously, and it's where I first learned about training. Speed, strength, power, agility. We did all of it in season and off season. Why? Football in Texas.

We didn't make the playoffs my senior year, and we knew it going into the last game of the season. I vividly remember the very last play I had in that sport, because I knew it was my last game. I remember how emotional and sad I was that one of the things that had defined my high school years was coming to an end, and I could point to the very last second on the scoreboard when it happened. I remember the next week at school, when we turned in all of our equipment and moved out of our lockers to make room for next year's team. That wasn't just the last time I played football. It was the last time I trained specifically to try to win in that sport.

I stopped after high school. Some people are fortunate enough to keep playing competitive sports into college, and some even professionally. They're not immune, though, just like Michael Jordan wasn't.

That's the deal with a sport. The season is a scoreboard that somebody else plugs in. It tells you when to show up, how hard to go, and what you're training for. Make the team. Win district. Be ready by the first game. As long as that scoreboard is on, you train.

Then somebody unplugs it. Graduation, an injury, a job, a baby. Nobody announces it. There's just a last whistle, and for most people it's the last day their body had a reason to train.

There are two streams here. One is the adult. The other is the kid. Most of the adults in our gym are years, if not decades, past their own sports days. The kid is in the thick of it, and the parent decides how that kid trains outside of practice. Almost every time, that means more of the sport. Speed camps, a pitching coach, private lessons on Sunday afternoons. What the parent knows, or maybe doesn't see yet, is that someday the sport will end for their child. And when it does, what did they do to instill fitness as a lifestyle? Especially if they don't live it themselves.

The Off-SeasonWhat a season builds, and what it leaves behind

Let me be clear about something first. Competitive sports for kids are an amazing way to build resilience, determination, fitness, relationships, discipline, respect. The list goes on and on. I played.

What a sport really does, though, is outsource those things. Every one of them can also be built at home, and none of them become less meaningful once you're done competing. If anything they matter more. The training for them is what goes away. The practices, the coach, the calendar, the reason to show up. All of that leaves with the season, and the things it was building are now on you.

The whole thing hinges on the desire to win. To beat the other team, or the other guy if it's a one-on-one sport. Or maybe it's the desire to not lose. To not be last, to not be humiliated, to not be embarrassed in front of people. Whatever drives you during the season, it's pressure, and some of it might carry over into the off-season. But once the sports season of your life is over, the pressure is over too, if the only place it ever came from was a game, a match, or a tournament that was going to expose you.

I can remember that from my years playing football. I was a defensive back, and there were times our coach would assign me to cover the other team's best receiver, one on one. We'd talk about it the whole week leading up to the game. The coach would talk about being on an island with that receiver, and I was told to go wherever he went, even if it meant following him to the bathroom. If I succeeded, you wouldn't hear from that receiver the whole game. If I failed, he could score the game-winning touchdown and become the hero for his team. That alone was motivation for me to work on my speed and my skills.

CrossFit teaches a hierarchy for developing an athlete. It's a pyramid. Nutrition is the base. Then conditioning, then gymnastics, which just means control of your own body, then weightlifting and throwing. Sport sits at the top. Every layer stands on the one below it, and the top is where you take all of it out and play. Regularly learn and play new sports is written right into the definition of fitness. Sport is supposed to be the reward, though, not the foundation. Youth sports flip that pyramid upside down. The kid gets the sport first, and the base underneath it is whatever the season happened to build. When the sport goes away, there was never a base there to stand on.

I've had a lot of former high school and college athletes tell me the same thing. They walk into a gym and they don't know what to do, because their whole athletic life somebody was telling them. In your late teens and twenties that seems harmless. By the time those same people show up at our gym in their thirties and forties, they've spent half their life not being active, and modern life has dug a hole deep enough that they don't know how to dig out of it on their own.

The DesignWhere the fitness lives

Our kids and teens train at the same hour as the adults. That's the whole design.

When mom and dad are on the floor, the kids are on the floor. Same hour, same building, same drive home. Fitness stops being the thing you do for the team and becomes the thing your family does on Tuesday. When the school season ends, nothing changes at CrossFit OTL, because our schedule was never built around the school season in the first place.

We run kids and teens twelve months a year for the same reason. A kid who only trains during the season learns that fitness has a start date and an end date. A kid who trains year-round learns that it doesn't have either one.

There's a line I hear from a lot of parents. “We'll try it and see if they like it.” Most parents have a few fundamental things in life that are not negotiable. Brushing their teeth. Going to school. For some it's chores. And there's a list of things to avoid, like crossing a busy street or drinking something from under the sink. I know that may sound ridiculous next to a gym class, but there are decisions in life that get made for the child, not by the child. For their own good, not their immediate happiness. I think most of us can agree that if we only did the things that make our kids happy, we might all be miserable.

Let sports build ability. Let the lifestyle build the body, the relationship with movement, and the default that your kid carries into adulthood. Those are two different jobs, and a season can only do the first one.

We're not trying to be a sports training facility. We're a life training facility. Sports happen to benefit from what we do.

Your MoveWhat this asks of you

• If you are a parentTrain where your kids can see you. Same building, same hour. It doesn't happen at drop-off. It happens when they watch you do it.
• If you are the parent in the folding chairYou drive them to and from practice, you sit through every tournament, and you're waiting for the moment they get their shot. Their sport is going to end someday. What outlasts it is whatever they watched you do. Bring them with you.
• If you have not had a season in twenty yearsThe season isn't coming back, and you don't need it to. You need fifteen days a month and a room full of people who expect you to walk through the door.