Lessons Learned from a Nontraditional Sports Program: CrossFit Kids for Youth at Risk

Authors

Christina M. Gipson, Georgia Southern UniversityFollow
Tamerah Hunt, Georgia Southern UniversityFollow
Michael T. Moore, Georgia Southern UniversityFollow

Abstract

Offering youth, especially youth at risk, access to something different has the opportunity to allow participants to discover new passions and interests. A nontraditional sports program was offered to middle school students who were members of the local Boys and Girls Club during the 2015–2016 academic year. Identifying a program focusing on CrossFit was valuable because CrossFit Kids programming is geared to develop the whole child addressing health and lifestyle choices and social responsibility. The purpose of this paper is to describe the program, examine what worked and did not work, and note what changes were made based on the outcomes. Overall, the program proved to be valuable for the participants. Success was found when the participants’ voices were used to inform adjustments to the program based on their needs instead of following pre-defined, fixed outcomes.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Gipson, C. M., Hunt, T., & Moore, M. T. (2018). Lessons learned from a nontraditional sports program: Crossfit kids for youth at risk. National Youth Advocacy and Resilience Journal, 3(1), 25-37. https://doi.org/10.20429/nyarj.2018.030104