Syndicate Crown Emerges as Second Semifinal for Wilson Pak, Says He Plans to “Over-Deliver”
Last week, CrossFit announced the last two semifinal events to round out the 2022 season. Included in the list, a new event – the Syndicate Crown – operated by the same team organizing the MACC semifinal.
“The CrossFit Games reached out and proposed whether or not we could pull off another semifinal and we went back and forth to figure out what the best plan would be and for our situation,” said Wilson Pak, the event director of the Syndicate Crown and Mid Atlantic CrossFit Challenge.
“We thought it would be best to stay in an area that we thought we’d be optimistic to run a live event and that was going to be back to back weekends in Knoxville, Tennessee.”
Just two weeks prior to the Syndicate Crown becoming a semifinal event, CrossFit released a partial list – raising questions as to why the list was not yet complete – but Pak said conversations with CrossFit to host a second semifinal only began a few weeks ago.
The MACC and Syndicate Crown will be held in back to back weekends, making logistics on the events team and securing the venue, the Civic Coliseum in Knoxville, feasible. But running two semifinal events comes with its challenges, especially when looking to make each event stand out while ensuring to send the fittest through to the CrossFit Games.
“There are some things like scoring and broadcast and certain aspects of signage that we will keep very consistent so that it looks professional,” added Pak.
“In regards to programming, it’s going to be a challenge on our team to make sure they each have their own flavor and character, but we’ve been doing this a really long time…Whether it’s programming for the affiliate [12 Labours CrossFit] or programming for five of the local events that we run throughout the year and now two semifinals, the running theme is that we get a lot of reps in.”
Each semifinal will have the flexibility and creativity to program most of the event’s workouts – staying within certain parameters laid out by CrossFit. Athletes will also be required to take on two workouts programmed by CrossFit, a challenge Pak says he’s willing to take on.
“I think from CrossFit perspective to standardize as much as they can while giving creativity to event organizers, it is going to be challenging but the event organizers need to rise to that challenge to be able to deliver that.”
As for potentially spreading out the two semifinal events in different states or even different parts of the world – that’s a discussion far down the road.
“There is a possibility that we can hopefully relocate maybe one of the events, but we’re not looking that far ahead because this year is so pivotal in really making sure that we send the right people to the CrossFit Games.”