I did an interview with the Catalyst Athletics founder and owner, Greg Everett, a few years ago. Normally, I wouldn’t go back to somebody and ask for a second interview after they already did one for me, but I thought it was appropriate in this case.
 
Catalyst Athletics has undergone a lot of changes in the last four years. Greg and Aimee shut down the original Catalyst gym in Sunnyvale, California and moved to a place in the middle of the woods outside Bend, Oregon. The vast majority of the original Catalyst crew is gone now. Greg has basically retired from competitive lifting. Aimee has increased her role as a coach. Their team of lifters has gone from almost entirely in-house to almost entirely remote. The sport has grown a lot. Time has passed. We’ve all gotten older and wiser. In 2012, Catalyst was the new kid on the block, winning a women’s team trophy at the American Open and making its first big splash on the national scene. Now, in 2020, Catalyst is an established presence in the weightlifting community. The program has become first-name famous. You can say “Catalyst” in US weightlifting, and everybody knows who you’re talking about. Hell, I’ve been writing for the company for eleven years, and I’ve heard a lot of people refer to me as “the Catalyst guy.”
 
With that much water under the bridge, and all the changes that come with time, I thought it would be nice to check back in with Greg. Here’s what he had to say.
 
It’s been seven years since Catalyst Athletics had its big national debut at the American Open in Palm Springs. What would you consider the most noteworthy moments from then to now? Biggest successes? Biggest obstacles you’ve had to deal with?
 
I took my first lifter (Steve Pan) to a national meet in 2009, and then 2012 was the first time we entered a full team in competition, which was a great sign of our growth (especially when we won silver).
 
There have been a lot of high points since then. Obviously our women’s team winning the national championship in 2016 was a huge moment, but Jessica Lucero breaking all the American records multiple times, Amanda Braddock breaking the national clean & jerk record, John Downey winning a national championship… there are so many things that break the day to day monotony and remind you why you do it.
 
The biggest obstacle is the same as it’s always been for coaching weightlifting—money. It costs us a lot to do this with all of the competition travel and the various expenses we help many of our lifters with. It’s easier these days in the sense that there are a lot more people willing to pay for coaching, especially remote, but like any other work, that’s time-consuming and tiring, which means the thing you’re doing it to support is what suffers in most cases. I realize it sounds odd to basically say that getting paid to coach makes coaching suffer… but what I mean is that coaching high-level lifters is still not only not a money-maker, it’s a money pit. You have to generate income from other sources, one of which can now be coaching weightlifting, but just a different demographic—lower level competitive and more recreational lifters are the ones who actually have money because they have the time to have real jobs that pay them.
 
Since we moved in 2016 to the middle of nowhere, we also now have the challenge of doing most of our coaching remotely, which is very different from having all of your lifters together in one place right in front of you daily. This spreads out the time investment a lot more. Everyone is training at different times, which means as a coach you have athletes contacting you all day long every day rather than that interaction being confined to a single period of time. That gets stressful and a big challenge is managing that in a way that prevents you from burning out completely while also not compromising the quality of your coaching. I don’t have the formula down perfectly yet—and there isn’t a perfect way to do it—but I’ve definitely gotten much better at it.
 
The landscape of US weightlifting has changed dramatically since 2012. Describe the biggest differences you’ve noticed. Have any of those differences changed anything about Catalyst Athletics?
 
The biggest difference by far is the number of lifters in the country, and more impressively, the depth of talent we’re seeing now. Lifts that would have placed you in the top 5 at nationals 10 years ago will maybe get you 20^th place now. It used to be that there were the top one or two lifters in each class, and that was pretty consistent, and there was a big gap between them and everyone else. Now we have incredible battles for international teams with often several lifters asterisked out because there are so many in a single weight class who are good enough to make a team.
 
Far more people, and more suitably talented people, are getting involved and staying involved in the sport. US lifters are consistently medaling—even winning—in international competitions. It’s a pretty exciting time for the sport in the US, and it makes coaching both easier and more difficult. It’s easier in the sense that coaches are getting access to more lifters and more talented lifters; it’s harder because that talent now has to go up against a lot more other talent. The best lifters don’t get to so easily dominate their classes anymore. So it’s a lot more demanding as a coach to keep up with the competition. You really have to invest—you can’t coast on a given lifter’s natural talent.
 
USA Weightlifting as an organization is vastly improved. The CEO, Phil Andrews, deserves a lot of credit for this transformation. He works incredibly hard and it really shows in everything from how competitions are run to the administrative side of things from the coach and athlete perspective.
 
The other big one is how common remote coaching/training has become in the last couple years. It used to be an oddity, and now a lot of the best lifters in the country train with coaches who aren’t local. It’s probably a combination of the technology now allowing this to work and people’s attitudes about its effectiveness. Is remote coaching as good as live coaching? No way. But working remotely with a good coach is far better than working locally with a mediocre coach, so it’s really a no-brainer for a lot of athletes.
 
That change has really allowed Catalyst Athletics to be what it is now—we were able to get out of the gym business finally, which was a nightmare and a huge financial burden. We couldn’t operate the way we do now even five years ago.
 
Aside from giving Matt Foreman a big monetary bonus, what do you see in the future for Catalyst Athletics? Are there any changes on the horizon with our sport in general that might alter the direction of Catalyst?
 
Honestly I don’t see any fundamental changes coming any time soon. The operation is pretty solid the way it is, which is essentially me doing everything in terms of business and content, and then a little administrative help. Aimee has taken on much more coaching in the past couple years, so that’s been the biggest change—we split the team now rather than my coaching the majority of the lifters.
 
But as far as what everyone outside sees, I don’t expect much to change. I’m going to continue creating the best content I can while avoiding gimmicks and stupid marketing tricks like an STD, and continue in my naïve but stubborn insistence that we can be adequately successful this way by relying on the demographic of intelligent, discerning people who appreciate quality and reliability more than flashy packaging and pointless novelty. This stuff is already hard enough as it is without having to violate every single value of mine—if I have to do that, I may as well just become a pharmaceutical rep and make some money.
 
Let’s try to hold off as long as possible on selling your soul and going to work for Big Pharma, Greg. Here’s to many more years of Catalyst Athletics!