Welcome to Gym Class!
Decades ago, kids climbed trees. They raced each other down the street. They hung from monkey bars until their hands blistered, tumbled off the couch just to see what would happen, and somehow figured out how to do a cartwheel without a single lesson. They didn’t need a season. A league. A $2,000 travel schedule (on the low end). They just moved.
Somewhere along the way, we lost that. As someone like myself who was a part of the generation that grew up with the inception of travel sports and has been involved as a coach for the past 13 years it’s clear as day: Youth sports has become an industry — and not a healthy one. Travel teams before kids can tie their shoes. Early specialization that burns kids out before middle school. Guilt-tripping parents into believing that if their 6-year-old isn’t on a club team, they’re already behind. If you’re like me and grew up as a kid through this rat race and now being on the other side of things as parent of young kids you may have a sour taste in your mouth as you realized the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.
And here’s the part nobody wants to admit: it’s not working.
Kids today are enrolled in more organized sports than any generation before them — and they’re weaker, less coordinated, and less resilient than kids were a decade and a half ago. We’re seeing high schoolers who can’t do a push-up. Teenagers who can’t skip. Bodies that have never learned to crawl, climb, hang, or fall correctly, because they went straight from the car seat to the sideline of a travel soccer game.
Somewhere we swapped movement for participation, and play for performance. If you’ve been in this industry long enough you know the exact decline I’m talking about.
This is a return to the basics. This is Gym Class.
Our new Gym Class is built on the stuff kids are supposed to be doing: running, jumping, crawling, climbing, tumbling, hanging, rolling, and playing. You know…the kind of thing school gym class use to sort of be but does not really even exist anymore. No positions. No standings. No pressure. Just real movement that builds real strength — the physical literacy every single sport, and every single childhood, is supposed to be built on.
If you’re a young parent like me and this message resonates with you… I’m happy to announce to you that Gym Class is now OPEN.
We could not be more excited to start this and begin the revolution against the mainstream youth development model.