Places 13th in South Regional crossfit competition

Powell High School alum Cooper Wise went into the South Regional competition in San Antonio, Texas, for the Crossfit Games ranked 47th out of 50 competitors hailing from across the country and Latin America. He wound up finishing 13th.

“It was definitely a good fun experience,” said Wise. “I definitely did better than I expected — probably [than] most people expected me to.”

The process to get to the South Regional crossfit championship started in February with an open competition; it takes place online, with around 300,000 people worldwide submitting scores for the weekly workouts with video validation. This process takes place over the course of five weeks.

The world is split up into 17 divisions where the top 20 men and women from each division in the United States and Canada, the top 10 from Latin America, Asia and Africa and the top 30 from Europe and Australia compete in eight regional competitions.

Wise competes in the Southwest Region, comprised of Colorado (where Wise had been doing clinical rotations as part of his education), Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. He was one of about 9,000 male crossfitters vying for a top 20 spot for the regional competition.

Wise finished 23rd, but three guys ahead of him decided to compete as a team — which bumped Wise into the Southwest Region’s 20th slot and sent him to the South Regional competition.

Wise didn’t start out with a specific interest in crossfit.

At Powell High School, Wise played football, basketball and soccer. After graduating from PHS in 2012, Wise attended the University of Wyoming, and in the the spring of 2013, he walked onto the football team.

Wise loved football and loved playing, but he decided to quit after a year with the team.

“Honestly, what it came down to was [football] interfered with school too much,” said Wise. “Doing a hard major like nursing, with a lot of science and labs and discussions and just all that went with it, it was too much to do both well. So I knew I had to choose one or the other, and I chose school.”

But in deciding to no longer play football in the spring of 2014, Wise unknowingly opened a door to a future in crossfit.

“I realized while playing football that I actually enjoyed the working out and conditioning and all that stuff that goes into the offseason training for football,” Wise said.

A friend who was already doing crossfit suggested Wise give it a try, telling him, “you’re really good at lifting, you’re really competitive, so I think you’d really like it.”

At UW, there is a crossfit student group and a Laramie gym opened its doors to the students for free for a twice a week class.

“I went and it totally kicked my butt,” said Wise of going to crossfit for the first time. “It was super hard, but I just really liked it and really enjoyed it and just started going after that.”

After attending the class for six months, Wise started attending the gym regularly as a non-student group member.

“The student group was more just my intro to crossfit and then after that I just like took off with it,” Wise said.

He began training for this year’s crossfit competition last December, for 15-20 hours a week.

In making the regional competition, Wise was pitted against the top 20 crossfitters in his Southwest Region and the South Central Region (comprised of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi) plus the top 10 from Latin America. That made for a total of 50 men competing in a three day event in San Antonio, held from May 19-21.

By leaping from his 47th place ranking to 13th, Wise wasn’t too far off of cracking the top five and earning a spot at the Crossfit Games — the national competition.

After his strong finish at regionals, Wise said he “definitely [wants] to go back and compete again next year and I think I definitely will be training in hopes of trying to qualifying for the Crossfit Games.”

Wise added that making it to the national contest will be tough, as many qualifiers treat crossfit as their full-time job — in that they train all day, every day, year-round and get paid to do it.

Wise said that will not be the case for him, as he’ll still be working full-time this year.

Last fall, Wise graduated with a bachelor’s degree in nursing and is currently an RN. He has dreams of one day going back to school to be a nurse anesthetist. 

Wise said he chose nursing because “I just really enjoy science overall; I always have and I enjoy the aspect of health care — of helping people to change their lives for the better and just caring for people in their time of need when they are vulnerable or going through hard experience.”

“So I just think nursing provides a really good opportunity to do both of those and it’s just a really versatile career field,” he said. “You can do a lot of different things, there is a lot different options involved. ... It’s hard to get bored in nursing, because there’s so many different things you can do, different aspects to it.”

With six months until the next Southwest Region crossfit open competition, Wise said he’s continuing to train with hopes of advancing to the South Regional competition again. Wise plans on bumping up his training to between 20-30 hours a week, getting closer to 30 hours late in the year.

“As it gets closer to December and January, that’s when you really want to start increasing your training, so you’re peaking during that time of like regionals,” he said.

Courtesy photos