Stream Fitness Offers Affiliates, At-Home Athletes Chance to Compete at Wodapalooza

Wodapalooza is back after a one-year hiatus due to COVID-19. While the Miami beach competition draws upwards of 30,000 spectators, not everyone can make the trip to South Florida for the festivities. Stream Fitness, a robust gym management system founded by Scott Panchik and Jacob Heppner, is bringing Wodapalooza to the community with the Virtual Gauntlet companion. 

Remind me: The Wodapalooza Gauntlet is a one-hour competition featuring grueling workouts programmed by five-time CrossFit Games champion Mat Fraser and the HWPO team. This competition will take place on January 13-15, with the top performers moving on to the finals on January 16. The competition is open to all athletes.  

• Community members can register and participate in the Virtual Gauntlet – as a gym or as an individual – through the Stream Fitness app. They just have to set up a camera and record their performance.
• Those participating in the Wodapalooza Gauntlet can compare their videos to top competitors within the app and also receive feedback from a massive community of judges.

The details: The price of registration for an individual is $10 USD, providing access to all of the Virtual Gauntlet workouts spread throughout the weekend. The price of registration for an affiliate is $50, which includes an unlimited number of registrants from the affiliate. 

• Panchik is excited to give athletes the opportunity to watch themselves side by side with other athletes to learn from these types of events. The idea came from years of breaking down videos with iPads side by side with his brothers, Saxon and Spencer, during the open. 

Panchik: “There are so many athletes that were not able to qualify, or maybe even partake in the event because of travel restrictions and different things like that…Local competitions are difficult right now because of how people are feeling, and it’s definitely a challenge right now all around the world. What we wanted to do is we wanted to create this virtual opportunity for people to play along with the athletes that are going to be down at Wodapalooza doing the Gauntlet.”

Dustin Bosscher, CEO of Stream Fitness: “This is a more inclusive way than to just post your scores and kind of see yourself on a leaderboard. It’s to actually see yourself and be able to look at others.”

The process took some time. Stream Fitness launched in early 2021 as a gym management system, and the tech team put in considerable work throughout the year before the company approached Loud and Live. Matt O’Keefe, the President of Loud and Live, provided some feedback about a few adjustments to the platform. Bosscher made the changes in a matter of weeks and brought the platform back to Loud and Live.

• “When we reached out to Loud and Live about Wodapalooza, the question was, ‘how can we use what we have to make your event exciting for people at home and give them the opportunity to play along?’” Panchik said. 
• “Once we showed them the platform and how accessible it was and what it could do, it was something that they believed in. We are excited to partner with them and to dip our toes in the water here a little bit with bringing the community together and giving them something to rally behind.”

Kristen Chandler, Director of Communications for Loud and Live Sports: “When Scott and Dustin showed me the functionality of the app, I was excited about how it was based on the same idea as the Trials Finals, that we ran last year, and developed it further, making certain aspects of the competition much more user friendly.”

The bottom line: With numerous logistical and health concerns surrounding travel due to COVID-19, there are large numbers of people that won’t be able to head to South Florida for Wodapalooza, or potentially, other competitions in the future. The Stream Fitness app provides the community with a solution to this problem when those uncertainties seem to have no end. 

• “We’re setting out to elevate these events,” Panchik said. “We get our shot here with Wodapalooza and to prove what we have is something. Our goal is to continue to elevate the community in that way. So we’re gonna keep chugging away.”
• “As we grow, I think people are going to want that capacity to do that for all their events to get more of that community involvement,” Bosscher added. “Instead of having one affiliate have to do it themselves, there’s a place to go do it. And then they can just sign up, and it’s all managed for them.”