Underdogs Athletics Making Moves to Become the Premier Competitor Program in CrossFit
In the mid and late 1940s, developers flocked to a small town located in the middle of the Mojave Desert in Nevada to create what we know today as “The Entertainment Capital of the World”: Las Vegas. In the summer of 2020, renowned CrossFit coach Justin Cotler did the same but with the goal of building and developing “The CrossFit Athlete Training Capital of the World”. Recent moves by Cotler over the last three months indicate that those goals are getting closer to fruition.
Realistically, we want to have a footprint in the Top 10 in every division at the CrossFit Games.
Justin Cotler
Born out of Sisterhood
Cotler’s fitness resume includes stints as a coach during the now-defunct National Pro Grid League. It was during this and his time coaching on the United State’s International Functional Fitness Federation (iF3) team that he met some of the top CrossFit athletes in the world. One of those athletes included Kari Pearce, whom he would coach for the last three years of her competitive CrossFit career, including a podium finish at the 2020 CrossFit Games.
It was during the online stage of the 2020 Games that saw the groundworks of Cotler’s training camp. Thanks to sharing the same agent in Cooper Marsh, Pearce joined Bethany Shadburne at the home gym of Danielle Brandon in Dixon, California where they competed against and alongside each other. Both Shadburne and Brandon would play an integral role in helping Pearce to a top-5 finish and an invite to the Ranch for the final stage of the Games. It was that teamwork between the three world-class athletes that convinced Cotler that running a training camp filled by elite athletes could be beneficial.
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