How to Boost Profit and Retention With the 2023 Intramural Open

This is the intramural open and the idea came to me because at my high school, you start out by getting drafted onto one of four houses. I know it's a little bit Hogwarts. I was drafted into the Panthers. My future wife was drafted into the Panthers. Decades later, my daughter was drafted into the Panthers and now my son actually plays for the Panthers at this same high school, we're all in the same house . This can have intergenerational impact even at your gym if you do it right.

And today I'm gonna walk you step by step through the intramural open, what it is, what the purpose is, how you can use it with the CrossFit Open if you want to, or just use it as your own event. Here we go. By the way , if you want this guide, just click below and I will make sure that you get a copy of it for free. We've been publishing this thing now for almost a decade for free. Thousands of gyms around the world use this on its own or in conjunction with the CrossFit Open in some cases.

First off, why we do this, it is our mission to make gym owners successful. Because if you're successful, then you can change the lifespan and healthspan of the people in your community. And my ultimate mission is to help a million people find fitness just like I did back in high school, through events and challenges like the intramural program that we had back then. That's why this is such a great passion of mine to give this to you every single year. So the intramural open guide is free.

Again, if you just click the link below and you'll get into the the hard stuff, the the good copy here in just one second. Okay, so first, what is it? The instrumental Open is a four to six week competition that you can do at your gym. You're gonna put as many of your clients as you possibly can onto four teams. You're gonna give them some random tests of fitness that you make up or you get from somewhere else, and you're going to elect team captains. You're gonna let them go wild.

You're gonna reward spirit, you're gonna let them make up their team t-shirts. You're gonna hang a banner on the wall of the gym after it's all done. The way that you do it is really all about hype. This is your chance to celebrate your athlete's progress, to celebrate your community, and to celebrate your brand. It's gonna generate a ton of amazing stories for you, memories in the future, social media blog posts.

It's gonna get clients to wanna do goal reviews, to want to think about their progress and how to speed that progress up because it's also a great measuring stick. So here we go. I've got the backstory here, but I don't need to read it all to you. Let's get into the basics. So first off, what you wanna do is you wanna select captains. I'm gonna be saying four teams. Four teams, because that's how many teams we've always had at Catalyst.

But if you wanna do three bigger teams or six smaller teams, that's totally up to you. So the first thing that we always do is select captains. We want other people to be in charge of recruiting your members to do this. Every member who participates is a , a great addition to the program and it, it makes the whole intramural open season better. Ideally, you'd get all of your clients to do this, even if it's their first competition ever or their first event since high school.

That's, that's totally fine, but you don't wanna be the one recruiting it. What you wanna do is select captains. Now, in the past I've selected like the top athletes to be captains, but what you really want are the mavens, the people who have the most spirit, who are the most connected in your gym, who have the most energy. Think about your best clients, like the people who show up with batteries included and like feed everybody else with their energy.

Those are your captains because it's very, very hard to say no thanks to Betty Lou from Noon Group. But it's easy to say no to Coach Chris , right? So here we go. Um, what you're gonna do is select your four captains and then you're gonna host a draft party. Okay? Now I've got all the timelines here and stuff starting early, like starting right now, and I'm gonna come back to this in a moment, but I really want to talk to you about draft night. What we do is try to make this an event in itself.

All of us have this irrational fear of being like the last one picked, maybe not so irrational. In my case, it's happened so many times that I just kind of got used to it, but most of us don't ever wanna be the last one picked. And so what you wanna do is make the draft a big event where people are either pulling names out of hats or they're set up to like go out and recruit members from your gym.

So for example, what we would typically do is we would get as many people to sign up in advance as we can. We'd bring the , uh, the captains together. Usually we would go out for wings and we would like have a private draft, okay? And we wouldn't announce who got picked first or second or anything like that. Then it's up to the captains to go out and recruit everybody who didn't sign up. So in our gym, it would look something like 20% of our members would sign up in advance.

I would take the captains out for some wings, we would do a private draft, we would take some pictures of us doing the draft, but not release who got picked first. And then as soon as the draft was done, the captains would all pick up their phones. I would say go, and they would just go out and start recruiting as many people as they possibly could for their teams. Because part of the points here are for participation, okay ? I'm gonna get to the whole points breakdown here in a moment.

But this is exciting because everybody knows when draft night is, everybody's anticipating, Hey, there's going to be somebody DMing me, maybe two and maybe four people who want me to be on their team. So you wanna make sure that you like bring a list of your clients to the draft party so that the captains are doing it.

Now, other people have done this live , uh, one year we did it at Mary's cafe next to the gym where we had like, you know, random picks and drafts and, and the captains saw the list. The only problem with that is you always wind up having somebody pick last, okay? So you have to be wary of that. And if you don't want to create that scenario, that's fine. It turned out fine in our case, but you never know, right? So let's start with before the season even opens.

Now to help out the CrossFit affiliates who are watching or listening to this, we've made this overlap with the CrossFit open season. We've done that every year. In fact, the reason I think that the intramural open became so popular with all of the CrossFit gyms so early was because done just the traditional way where you sign people up and they pay HQ and they do the events. It really didn't make any money for the gym, but it really burned the coaches out.

People were doing a lot of extra volunteer work and yeah, it was exciting. It was amazing to see people getting prs. The coaches were participating in stuff, but after five weeks, man , people were tired, you know? And so we wanted to do this in a way that would actually help the gym owner profit, because that's our mission, right? We work for the gym owners. So , uh, you're gonna start now and what you're gonna do is run what we would call a pre-open program or an open prep course.

And so people who really wanna like fine tune their fitness, boost themselves up another 5%, maybe acquire a skill that they haven't done before, can have a chance to do that in the five or six weeks leading up to the open. So for example, double unders , if somebody's not gonna double unders or these elbows or toes to bar if they have the fitness, but lack the skill, this program is for them. You and I have seen it a hundred times, it lights us up every time I know somebody gets there .

First muscle up bar muscle up, fill in the blanks. I got my first bar muscle up because of the open one year , and it was incredible. Like there were 60 people cheering for me and I couldn't not get it. But you really increase people's chances of experiencing that thrill and that joy by having like an open prep course. Now, of course, you're gonna charge something for it because not everybody is gonna want it.

So you're not just gonna change your regular programming because not everybody wants to focus on competition or get prep for the open. You're gonna make this an option, and that means you're going to charge for it just for the people who want it so that not everybody else has to do it. Okay? Then you're gonna start promoting the intramural open. You're gonna start building the hype. Remember, you are giving people this experience that they are never going to get anywhere else.

Your gym is full of adults whose athletic career is over or never even started. And so we can give them all the bright spots that happen with sport without all the negative stuff. And this is a massive opportunity. It'll change our life. It's something that members from 10 years ago at my gym come up to me and say, I can still remember doing those box jumps at that crazy open of event . Or I can still remember accounting your burpees , uh, on the seven minute burpees.

When you're doing it on that mat, you know it, it's amazing for them. It's life changing. It's something they'll remember the rest of their lives. It is a tremendous gift that you're giving them, but don't impoverish yourself to do it. All right ? So January the eighth, by the 18th, you're gonna set up and select your scoring system. I've got a couple of options for you right here in the guide on the 19th, you pick your team captains. The 26th is gonna be draft day.

Make sure you post all your stuff in social media. You know, tag intramural, open tag two brain if you wanna have a lot of fans looking at it. You know, we love cheering people on. Even if you're not in two brain yet, that's okay. Then from the second to the 20th, you let people recruit. Um , I'm going to give you some guidelines on this that you can choose to use or not. And then , uh, starting February 16th is usually like your workouts. You can pick workouts yourself, you know, be creative.

You can use the CrossFit open workouts if you want to. If you're using the CrossFit open workouts, then your client should, should register for the CrossFit open and register for your intramural open. That way they've got the CrossFit scoreboard and they're participating with the broader CrossFit community, but they're more focused on your own local community too, because you are like doing more than just the CrossFit stop, right? You're doing your own big event.

So you've got all your workouts here. Now, what I like to do is I like to have like a six workout that is like a team based or they only get points for participation. One year we did a biathlon where we had all these like Nerf rifles and they would have to row 500 meters as quickly as they could jump up, shoot these pie plates that we had suspended across the gym with their Nerf rifles. And then like, you know, it , they would have to do burpees for everyone they missed or whatever.

Another year we just had like a big , uh, street hockey game that was incredible, super fun. But you wanna add something , um, like Captain's Gone Bad or whatever. You wanna add a fifth or a sixth event to your event to make it fun, okay ? You don't have to, it does prolong the season, but you can certainly do it if you can. And it's one of my favorite events every year, alright , April 6th postop open programs.

So right after the open is done, a lot of people are fired up like, wow, next year I'm getting that pullup, or next year I'm gonna get five. You know, I got my first , um, I got my first a hundred pound clean this year. It was amazing. Next year I wanna get 1 35. Awesome, right?

This is the time when you do goal reviews with people, when you talk about their progress, when you say, I'm so proud of you and you share that on social media and you , you know, you want to keep doing like all that stuff. This event creates so much media for you that you could be set for months, but you also want to make sure that while people are excited and they have momentum, that you're giving them the opportunity to really hit the gas pedal on their fitness.

And that means signing up for extra programs. Maybe they need to focus on strength and you've got like a six week , uh, strong man program going, or you've got like a a six week gymnastics program coming. You know, that's always really popular when people are excited. It's your job as the coach to help them accelerate their fitness, take advantage of that excitement because they're not that excited all the time. This is the best way to help your clients. Okay? So set up your pricing.

You know, we usually suggest 50 bucks and that might include a t-shirt or something, but you should be paying your staff for doing this, not just volunteering. And there's gonna be some extra cleanup and there might be some snacks, okay? You might actually wanna roll some other things into this like , uh, supplement taster night or something like that. Okay? Step two is select your captains, then set up your scoring. We love Echelon.

We've been partnered with Echelon for years on the intramural open water arena. Is is now really well set up to do this too. Either one of those programs will, will do really well by you, but you wanna set up your scoring there. If you're doing the CrossFit Open, one of the benefits of paying CrossFit 20 bucks is that they've got your scoreboard for you and they've got a really good scoreboard program so you can compare against other gyms worldwide and stuff, okay?

So if your focus is on like participating in this giant , uh, worldwide CrossFit community, absolutely tie the CrossFit open in and have your athletes register on crossfit.com. If your focus is really like on your gym and you want to just do the intramural open, that's also fine, or you can do both often. My gym does both. Alright ?

We're gonna be awarding points for performance like first , second, and third in different categories, but also for participation and really for spirit, like, spirit of the open awards at our gym is a huge deal in a massive honor. Okay, so set up your divisions. So you're gonna have like , uh, men's and women's and you might have RX or you might have like scaled or whatever. You can, you can set it up any way that you want to, right? I've given my history and some recommendations here.

Again, if you wanna have this guide so that you can peruse it at your own speed, just click the link below, I'll make sure that you get a copy. So then you're going to have registration. Here's draft day . This is where you see some amazing creativity with team names. Um, you know, we , we've seen draft Dodgers, , like a , a group a team that was mostly just chickens of people who didn't wanna do it. And of course they were happy they did later.

You know, I I'm sure you're gonna come up with a thousand different names. It's always so awesome to see , uh, like keeping it real is like a returning team at ours, whatever, okay ? And you're gonna organize them into teams based on that. Uh, the winning team is gonna have like a banner hung up in your gym. I'll , I'll give you a link to set that up later, but their name is gonna go up on your wall like forever.

And I've got banners back, you know, seven or eight years from these different teams when we started putting the banners up. Okay ? So here we go. These are all the step by step divide your serious competitors between the teams. So now every team has a chance at actually winning and it's really gonna come down to participation in spirit. That's what you want. You don't really, really wanna just celebrate the people who win every workout.

You really wanna celebrate people who are doing stuff for the first time and bring the spirit. Okay? So here's , uh, you know, a sample blog post that you can use to get people hyped up. Uh, there's also some, some like pre-open activities here. I mean, come on, look at this stuff. If you belong to a gym and your gym was posting team bees and burpees, you know, amazing. You have to tell people how to talk about this stuff though.

So like give them some hashtags to use like catalyst Open 2023 or whatever, okay? Like let them feel like they're part of something by being part of the hype and part of the media and that'll slowly snowball and just build this like overwhelming excitement.

I'll tell you it , it's rare to see fans show up for the first or the second workout, but by the fifth or the sixth, people are bringing in spouses kids and you've got kind of this carnival atmosphere at your gym, which is exactly what you want, okay? So pre-open programming, this is up to you. You can solely build people toward a competitive peak. I just give people the option. I know that like what I want is not always what my clients want. And so I just want to give them the choice.

If they wanna do an open prep group, they can. All right , here is how to do , uh, intramural open competition. So usually we give a point for everybody that completes the workout. Three points for every athlete that finishes among the top three women are top three men and five points if they win the spirit of the open award. Now, in a five week season, if you've got five teams, that's perfect. You should try and like find a way to divvy them up.

If you've got four teams, the competition is going to be a little bit intense to get that extra point, okay? But like that spirit of the open, that's really what makes this thing and people showing up in costume and stuff like, that's, that's amazing how theme weeks give , make it easy for people to get in the spirit. Okay? Um, one, one thing that people have done over the years when we're talking about amping it up is doing like Friday night lights.

So what they'll do when they hear what the workout is, they'll make their own workout announcement. Maybe the coaches will throw down right away as soon as they hear the announcement or whatever, like, look to the way that CrossFit has done this and emulate that in your own gym. They're giving you a model to follow. Alright ? Here's how to coach. Um, you know , from Josh , uh, Martin, from the Refined Art of Coaching. Make sure that you're setting people up for success, right?

Like you're not crowning the king and queen of your gym every year. What you're doing is giving people a new opportunity with new motivation to be successful at a new level. That's really what it's all about. And this, this collaborative competition is what's gonna push them that extra 5% to get that first achievement or go a little bit faster or lift a little bit heavier, whatever that is. That's what it's about. But use the excuse to talk about game day.

Like how do you eat for 72 hours leading up to your event? How do you approach it? Do you try it once and then go hard the second time? Or is it like always one and and done? You know, most people in your gym have never competed or haven't done it in decades, and so you need to teach them how to behave like athletes. It's also an amazing time to teach them how to win. So, so , so important. All right ? Coaching, it's all about the celebration.

You, it's not really about correcting technique, right? Like , um, they're performing out on the ragged edge, they're doing stuff they've never done. Their technique is not gonna be perfect during this period, though obviously the athletes with the best technique are going to win. So while you do wanna be correcting a little bit, you wanna be mostly celebrating. It should be about 80 20 celebrating and hype. The next thing that you wanna do is tell everybody exactly like what's going to happen.

So you are going to get here at six 50. If your heat starts at seven 10, there will be a warmup on the board. You will do the warmup on your own. I know that we always lead the warmup, but here you're going to actually do it on your own. Then you're gonna write your name under which heat you're gonna perform in, and as the heats fill, you'll just put it in the next one. That way we know that we've got enough judges for each heat and the judges will go last, et cetera . Okay? Next prizes.

I mean, you can choose any prizes you want. We put the banners up. I also pay for lunch for the winning team for a week at, at Mary's restaurant. Okay ? Uh, there's a link to Forever Fierce to get your banners done. Here's the step by step . How does this actually make you money? This is a CrossFit charges for this, and they should, they should charge more. It's a great event. However, CrossFit collecting money doesn't pay your cost to run this event.

Everything that we do is focused on making gym owners more revenue. So whether you're a CrossFit gym or not, I think you should be charging for this. It's not greed. I mean, the athletes want to get paid more. The gym owners should get paid more too. So here's a few options that you can do. Specialty courses in clinics, accessory programs. You could do skill sessions, you could do seminars. A lot of athletes will want to do some one-on-one training, just kind of like build things up.

And so there's , uh, gymnastics open prep course , uh, from beyond RX is in here, and some other great tips. Another good one is retail. Now, at this time of year, this is when people are saying like, okay, I'm feeling good, but how do I take things to the next level? Some of that's training, some of that's nutrition, but it's also a time when people are gonna be more curious about supplements. They're also going to be , uh, they're gonna wanna wrap their team.

You know, people feel like they're part of something for the first time, maybe in their whole lives. And so if you can find a way for them to be on a team by like buying some swag or whatever, great. Another great one is like a supplement pack or like a supplement taste or not , okay ? And then there's a bunch of other things here.

Uh, other gyms have had amazing ideas since we launched this way back in like 2012, where they did things like, you could earn two points by, by booking your goal review early, or you could earn a point by leaving a review on Google or Facebook. My suggestion is you pick maybe one of these instead of all of these and um, you know, plug that in. You don't always want people just doing stuff to help the gym, like the , the five star reviews or whatever. That stuff is amazing.

But remember, like you run a client-centric business and now more than ever, this event is about them. So the testimonial video is a great one. Do that. Or like the five star review or the goal review session, but I'm not sure that all of them really fit here. All right ? Now it's also awesome to do , uh, kids' heat. So while you're running this event, let's say that you're running it all on Saturday, whatever, okay? In the middle of the heat, you wanna put a kid's heat?

There's a couple reasons. Number one, their parents will always come in to watch them compete. Okay ? Second, it's just amazing to watch. I mean, it's, it's really, really common when I go to watch hockey games at like the junior and pro level for the kids to come out at intermission and everybody stays in their seats cuz they love to watch the kids. Third, it's just incredible to show off like how good these kids actually are. And fourth, it gives the judges a little break too.

So it's a super smart move to do a kids' heat to showcase your youth program. All right ? After the event, you want people doing a goal setting , um, session goal review. And then finally, if you've been doing this for several years, like I have, there's some tweaks in here to keep it fresh. My gym still gets excited. We still do it the same way that we did a decade ago. Other gyms might wanna make these tweaks or make these slight improvements.

Like this year I will add the five star reviews, for example. We haven't done that before and we'll, we'll get some points outta that. Um, you know, the last couple years, especially if you've been in lockdown, you , you couldn't really do the open, right? So , um, I would suggest like just doing it as prescribed here is gonna make you money, save you time, and, and really , uh, improve your retention. You'll get the benefit of the competition that you want your gym to get. Okay?

Draft everybody involved, the kids. And then finally, the biggest thing to come outta this is not just that the client has the pr it's that you can make them famous. Look, nobody in their life is saying, you are so good or amazing work today. That's just not happening.

And so part of our opportunity and responsibility is to actually put them on a podium, to make them famous, to shine the spotlight on them, to brag them up on social media, to feature them in your blog, to tell the story of their triumph on your email list. That's what it's all about here. And if you can't handle recording and producing media to stretch out the excitement and the benefit of this for your clients, hire somebody to do it.

You know, even if you gotta bring a teenager in with a cell phone to just take pictures and record and just build up your bank of content. I mean, if you can extend this five week feeling into three or four months, your clients will just love you that much more for it. Okay? Like two weeks after the open is done, the memories are starting to fade. People aren't talking about it to one another as much anymore, then their story comes up on your blog and it's, remember that time all over again.

I mean, that's incredible retention. All right ? So here's exactly the kind of media that you want from Mike Wilkinson, who you know, was editor at CrossFit while the CrossFit games was building up all the way to 2018. He tells you exactly what to do. Now finally, this is a lot of work. No matter how you do it, if you just do the CrossFit open or if you do the intramural open or both, it's gonna be a lot of work. So I've got some tips here too. Okay?

Like , um, you know, in, in the first few years we asked our coaches to volunteer. I don't do that anymore. I don't think that's fair. They were all, they're fine with it. But like coming out of the open season six weeks later with an exhausted team, boy that is tough. And uh, it's, you're exhausted too. It's tough to take the load. So here's what I do , uh, and I've got like eight really big tips in there for you. Okay? And then finally I've got a little bit of advice.

Um, I've done this now for a decade. I've got, there's a reason that we put this out and it's because we wanna make gym owners successful so that they can make their clients successful. So their clients can live longer and happier lives Competition done sparingly can encourage that, but competition done at the gym owner's cost at a cost of like, finance, emerg , you know, energy time.

That doesn't help anybody long term because the reality is, if if you put on a great show for your clients for five weeks and then you're burnt out from the following five weeks, it's gonna show and you're gonna lose all of the gains that you've made in retention and excitement. Uh , so I want you to be profitable at this. I mean, nobody deserves to make money more than a gym owner does. You're out there to serve.

Nobody's going to make a million dollars on the intramural open, but you should make enough. Remember that you and your coaches want to be able to do your best work. And that means having the best clients. It means running a profitable gym. It means getting sleep, getting food, and getting exercise yourself. There's a way to do this that doesn't grind you into the ground. That's why we produce these guides. Hope you find it helpful. And I, I'd love to see your pictures Tag me.

Tag two brain tag intramural open, and I will be your biggest fan outside of your own clients. We created the Gym Owners United Facebook group to help you run a profitable gym. Thousands of gym owners, just like you have already joined in the group. We share sound advice about the business of fitness every day I answer questions, I run free webinars and I give away all kinds of great resources to help you grow your gym. I'd love to have you in the group.

It's Gym Owners United on Facebook, or go to gym owners united.com to join. Do it today.