Yeah, 2010. Yes, sectionals and then our regional team when he did a sign-up in 2010. He didn’t make it, but that’s fine. I knew where he stood. I like to compete, and I like the action. I was always a sports fan.
When I heard about the games, I was like, “Oh, what is this?” I didn’t know. Nicole talked about the games in 2009. I didn’t think anything of it. I was just starting CrossFit.
Then 2010 was the first time they put it on the Internet. I had watched it that weekend and I was mesmerized. I was hooked like, “Oh, this is pretty cool.” That’s fun to watch.
2011 came, I volunteered Work the Media at Southwest regionals that year. I was just tweeting on the sidelines, because we had a video coverage, but it was all taped delayed. It was post-production recaps.
The only way to get live results out besides the leaderboard we would tweet. I was helping tweet results few winners and such. That was fun. I signed up to do it again in 2012 at regionals.
After doing it in ’11, I figured it’d be nice to have some context to give to these athletes. Some background like, “How great this performance was,” or “This is a superstar,” etc. Built-up some stats and such on the Southwest regional athletes and knocked out a park. It was fun tweeting that year.
That was the year that Chris Spealler had his epic comeback. The hashtag Spealler was turned in and stuff. That was fun.
Then the regional media director recommended me to HQ, say, “Hey, this guy would do really good. You should bring him out to the games.” Rory Mckernan called me up said, “Hey, would you like to come out?” I said, “Sure, that’d be great.”
I said, “I’ll bring all my stats, and I’ll merge them with everyone else’s regional stats and help out.” He said, “We don’t have other regional stats.” [laughs] A light bulb went off in my head like, “Oh, I could do this.”
I had a month or so to get ready for the games that year, in 2012. I got as much as I could on athletes that qualified, and then went out there and worked. It was in the TV production tracks and it was just amazing. It was a rush. It was so eye-opening to me.
In the following year, they had me come back at the beginning of the season in the open, regionals, and I just started building the stat databases and building upon what I’d done. I’ve been there ever since. This is my 10th year doing all the stat research for CrossFit.