Amy Hadsell, her husband Asa, and her sister started CrossFit together and fell in love with the sport. All of them had full-time jobs, but as they became further invested, they decided to open a gym. CrossFit North Mesquite started the way many gyms begin, out of a garage. For a year, they trained eight members.
Quickly, interest in their gym outgrew their garage, and they began training athletes out of a Taekwondo studio, until they got too big for that space, and moved to another, only to outgrow it as well. After many moves and growth, Amy and Asa now serve 130 athletes at their gym in Mesquite, TX, a suburb east of Dallas.
They have six part-time coaches and Amy and Asa coach the majority of the classes.
Amy has a background in gymnastics, having participated in competitive gymnastics as a child, she has coached competitive girls gymnastics teams for 15 years.
She fell in love with CrossFit when she realized that she could have such a positive impact on people’s lives. As a nurse, she has an inherent desire to help people, but she didn’t see the same direct improvements in her patients that she was able to see in her athletes.
Amy’s uncle was their very first member. When he started training in their garage, he was obese and diabetic. She and Asa didn’t know what the impact of CrossFit would be on him but were happy to help get him moving. Soon enough he was losing weight and feeling better. Then after a consistent regimen of CrossFit and improved nutrition, the doctors took him off of his blood pressure and diabetes medicine. CrossFit completely changed his life.
The mission at CrossFit North Mesquite is to “make lives better through movement.”
Kids and adults are stuck in cars, TVs, and at their desks. They aren’t looking to create a gym that caters to the top athletes in the world. Instead, they seek to serve the everyday athlete. By providing a space where people have a community and are coached through their fitness journey, Amy and the coaches at North Mesquite want to enable people to get at least one hour of movement a day. That experience, the ability to have such an incredible impact on a family member, drove her and Asa to go all in on CrossFit.
Before Mesquite used SugarWOD, they would provide each new athlete at their gym a notebook, but they could never get workout tracking with the notebook to catch on. The majority of people weren’t consistently using it, and they found that people were tracking their workout performance in apps on their phones. So, they decided that it was better to find one tool that the whole gym could use. So, they started looking for a more sophisticated performance-tracking solution.
North Mesquite started using SugarWOD in September 2016, and Amy expressed that the impact has been more than they’ve ever imagined,
“People are crazy with the fist bumping. They are way more engaged and care more about how one another is doing. There are more conversations at the gym, more encouragement, and more community involvement.”
At first, Amy was kind of worried that it would take a lot of work to get all of the coaches and athletes on board, but they all embraced it, “It’s kind of like how people get into Facebook.” Now coaches have a better handle on how their athletes are doing. When they started the gym, and they were smaller, the whiteboard was a big deal, and their coaches could keep tabs on how athletes were doing. But as they grew, that became more difficult. Now with SugarWOD, they can keep up with and track athlete progress.
Using SugarWOD is embedded in their gym culture. Right when a new athlete comes to the gym and signs up for membership, the coaches show them the app and then have the athlete download it together, right there at the gym and get the new athlete all set up. This small exchange ensures that all of their athletes are using SugarWOD and connecting with one another.