A good adaptive program lives or dies on its coaches. You can have the specialty equipment, the accessible facility, the right schedule, all of it, and still get it wrong if the people running the room don’t know what they’re doing or don’t truly care. So before you decide whether Adaptive Athletes in Motion at Cobra Command in Basehor is right for you or someone you love, you should know who you’d be trusting with it.
The short version: this is not a side project for us. It’s personal, and we built it on purpose.
Coach Jill at the CrossFit Games
I’ll start with my own story, because it’s a big part of why this program exists.
A few years back, I had the honor of being Logan Aldridge’s coach for the 2021 CrossFit Games. Logan competes with an arm amputated above the elbow, and that year he podiumed at the Games, taking third among the best upper extremity adaptive athletes in the world. Coaching an athlete at that level, on the biggest stage the sport has, is a different kind of pressure and a different kind of privilege. It changed how I see what’s possible, and it never wore off.
Coaching adaptive athletes has been a passion of mine for a long time. Not a specialty I added to a menu. A conviction. Once you’ve seen what an adaptive athlete can do when someone actually coaches them and holds them to a real standard, you can’t unsee it. You spend the rest of your career trying to give more people that shot.
Coach Jarrad and two years with Frankie
Coach Jarrad, has worked one-on-one with Frankie for two years now. If you read Frankie’s story, you already know what that partnership has produced: a man in his sixties, living with a degenerative disease, pushing over 500 pounds and holding onto his independence year after year.
Jarrad didn’t get there on instinct alone. He’s put in the work to keep getting better at this, training and trading knowledge with other gyms doing serious adaptive coaching, including FitinKC in Parkville and Kaw Valley CrossFit in Lawrence. Coaching adaptive athletes well is a skill, and skills get built on purpose. He treats it that way.
Coach Chellie and fitness for everyone
Coach Chellie brings something you can’t teach: a genuine, bone-deep belief that fitness should be accessible to everyone. No exceptions, no asterisks. It shows up in how she coaches, in the way she holds a real standard and real patience at the same time, and in how she makes people feel like they belong the moment they walk in.
Why we don’t treat this as optional
Once you’ve watched what real coaching gives back to an adaptive athlete, not just in the gym but in their actual life, in what they can do and how independent they get to stay, you know we MUST offer fitness for them. That conviction is why this program exists, and it’s why we put our most experienced coaches on it instead of treating it as an afterthought.
What this means for you
Credentials matter because they’re a promise. When you or someone you love walks into our adaptive program, those years add up to something specific: coaches who have worked with adaptive athletes at the highest level of the sport, who keep learning from the best gyms around, who have put in real time with real athletes right here in Basehor, and who care about this in a way you can feel from the first handshake. And they all carry the Adaptive and Inclusive Trainer Certification.
If that’s what you’ve been looking for, book a free No Sweat Intro. Come meet us, tell us your story, and let us show you what’s possible. We built this place for YOU and we are so ready to meet you.
See you in the gym,
Jill
