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Nov 10, 2024

"American Ninja Warrior" peak passed. But the sport is growing in Colorado.

Story first appeared in: How it started: Nine-year-old Kaden Lebsack idly flips through TV channels. Somewhere amid the cartoons and sitcoms, he’s transfixed by images of lithe men and women

Story first appeared in:

How it started: Nine-year-old Kaden Lebsack idly flips through TV channels. Somewhere amid the cartoons and sitcoms, he’s transfixed by images of lithe men and women propelling themselves across an elevated sequence of precarious handholds and narrow ledges, with humiliation waiting in a splash pool below. A clock ticks relentlessly as competitors fly across this fiendishly fun playground with strength, skill and creativity.

How it’s going: Lebsack, now 19, is a seasoned veteran of the ongoing TV hit “American Ninja Warrior,” a coach at his family’s ninja-training gym in Castle Rock, and an entrepreneurial promoter of a national competition.

A 2015 television audience at its high-water mark of 6.5 million viewers shared Lebsack’s enthusiasm for the NBC program, which for him quickly morphed into an obsession. Over the next several years, that childlike fascination with the show led to a meteoric competitive career that in turn opened up business opportunities that made Lebsack — and his parents — prime exponents of the organic evolution of the ninja concept.

Although the flagship show’s ratings have steadily declined to less than half of what they once were, the evolving sport continues to grow by sheer grassroots momentum. In Colorado, at least two dozen ninja gyms and parks fuel that expansion, drawing on Americans’ desire for competition tempered by camaraderie, full-family activities, and made-for-Instagram moments.

For the super-competitive, it even inspires Olympic aspirations.

While Lebsack initially dabbled in gymnastics and parkour, once his family began watching the show together, he channeled his attention to ninja. Following a familiar pattern of parents investing in their kids’ nascent passions, Kaden’s mom, Brandi Lebsack, found her a ninja gym — in Longmont, more than an hour’s drive each way. The commute yielded a connection with John Maul, a competitor-turned-coach who recognized Kaden’s potential in its infancy.

“I just felt this aura coming from this one kid that I didn’t feel from anyone else, and I’m like, this is the one I’m gonna spend all my time and energy on,” Maul recounts. “It’s just a gut feeling that I had.”

I just felt this aura coming from this one kid that I didn’t feel from anyone else, and I’m like, this is the one I’m gonna spend all my time & energy on.

— John Maul, Kaden Lebsack’s coach

With only two months of training, Lebsack took third place in a national competition in the 10-13 age bracket — at age 10 — validating his early enthusiasm. At the same time, Maul, who also lives in Castle Rock, shared Brandi Lebsack’s fatigue with the commute to the Longmont facility.

The next step seemed obvious: open their own gym closer to home.

Brandi, who previously worked with at-risk youth, and her husband, Ryan Lebsack, who owns an energy consulting firm, pulled money from their retirement fund. Maul got a loan to cover his stake and in 2017 they partnered to launch Ninja Intensity, which soon expanded to its current 12,000-square-foot warehouse-type space on the south end of Castle Rock.

With the Lebsacks managing the business side and Maul supervising the coaching, the facility hosts not only up-and-coming ninjas, but birthday parties, classes and competitions.

While born of the need for a more convenient training option, Ninja Intensity has become a promising business. Kaden, who coaches when he’s not competing, hopes to eventually buy out his parents’ stake and transition to a partnership with the 33-year-old Maul. He has already launched an offshoot business called Bucket of Chalk, which serves the dual purpose of marketing hand chalk for athletes and hosting competitive events.

It also continues a familiar ninja progression — from fan to competitor to entrepreneur. A variation of that story also unfolded in Longmont, where ANW regular Nate Hansen and a virtual all-star squad of competitors and coaches last year launched the Ark Ninja gym.

While the business “has its highs and lows,” Brandi Lebsack notes, they’re learning how to ramp up marketing efforts, which still lean heavily on word of mouth as kids get exposed to ninja and then seek coaching or avenues for competition.

“We don’t really rely on (the show) anymore, which is good,” Maul adds. “It helps a little bit, but we’ve gotten to that point where kids see the gym and think it’s really cool. They don’t even associate it with the show most of the time, they’re just like, ‘Oh, I want to be a monkey!’”

In 2013, Noah Kaufman waited in a sectioned-off area on the set of “American Ninja Warrior” in Los Angeles as other competitors ran the course. A serial entrepreneur and emergency room physician from Colorado, Kaufman arrived at this made-for-TV competition having viewed the show’s televised Japanese predecessor, “Sasuke.”

The obstacle course challenge seemed like a natural evolution from his decades-long passion for rock climbing, so he applied to be cast in the U.S. show. That’s how he found himself in the ninjas’ “bullpen” in the wee hours of the morning — control over lighting and other logistical concerns make overnight filming preferable — as competitor Alan Connealy negotiated the course.

And then plummeted to the ground.

Connealy dislocated his shoulder in the fall and Kaufman recalls him screaming in pain as organizers called for an ambulance. In the meantime, Kaufman vaulted over the bullpen railing and offered his services as an ER doctor — only to be rebuffed by officials and ordered back to the waiting area.

We envisioned ninja parks all over the place, and ninja gyms. And then we decided to make a business to do ninja competitions for everybody else.

— Noah Kaufman, aka the Ninjadoc

“You’re a doc?” Connealy interjected, and Kaufman indicated that he dealt with dislocations frequently — whereupon the injured ninja asked him to take a look.

Kaufman recalls show workers telling him to stop or he wouldn’t be allowed to compete. But he ignored them and worked Connealy’s shoulder back in place. When he turned around, there were video cameras everywhere, capturing the drama.

Kaufman later navigated the qualifying course with style and relative ease, to the crowd’s delight. He was soon dubbed “Ninjadoc.” When the show eventually aired, his shoulder-fixing heroics were featured prominently.

“They always want a narrative,” Kaufman says.

From his early success in that competition, the show’s fifth season, Kaufman pursued a much broader narrative with the help of some fellow ninjas. They banded together under the name of the Wolfpack and performed under that flag in individual and team competitions — including a 2017 qualifier in Denver.

Kaufman’s entrepreneurial instincts pushed the concept even further. He envisioned Wolfpack as a business — “social entrepreneurialism,” in his words — that addressed childhood obesity through promoting physical activity and leaning into the widespread exposure that made him and his fellow ninjas so popular.

“We’re like, ‘This should be something that kids can do, that families can do together to stay healthy,’” he says. “And we envisioned ninja parks all over the place, and ninja gyms. And then we decided to make a business to do ninja competitions for everybody else.”

Starting in 2017, they rode the wave of the show’s popularity to put on competitions in Colorado and around the country — including an event at the University of Denver. The Wolfpack Ninja Tour touted the slogan “making the world healthy one kid at a time.” The concept drew the interest of a New York private equity firm, which invested in an idea that seemed poised to explode.

The group toured cities like New York, Atlanta and even Hong Kong, putting on events that in addition to competition also made room for classes for fans who idolized the top ninjas. But the business sputtered, investors lost money and then, with the arrival of COVID-19 Kaufman says “it really kind of fell apart” and shut down altogether last year.

“Our business failed, unfortunately, but it succeeded in a way,” he figures. “We helped to build the market, but it wasn’t profitable, which is what our investors wanted. We felt like we succeeded because we touched a lot of kids’ lives. But you need financial success to really grow something like that.”

Kaufman, now 50 and living in Denver, stepped back from the ninja world and regularly travels to Cheyenne Wells for weeklong stretches as a physician at the local hospital. He also continues to pursue rock climbing and entrepreneurial projects. But he passed the torch, and much of the equipment, to a former Wolfpack colleague who soldiers on with the same enthusiasm, but a slightly different business model.

Matt Greco had spent seven years with the Wolfpack, initially building the obstacles the ninjas used on their courses and eventually moving up to manage operations. When he recognized in early 2023 that the company would be shutting down, he didn’t want to give up on the progress he had witnessed.

From a pragmatic perspective, he saw that what had worked best for the Wolfpack involved plugging in to an existing crowd — like when they put on events at a fair or festival. But those events didn’t produce financial returns on a scale that moved the needle for investors.

So as he watched the company prepare to sell off its equipment, he huddled with his family and came to a decision: He wanted to take a shot at reimagining the Wolfpack concept in a scaled-down way that could be profitable.

“We pulled savings, we sold stuff we could stand to sell, and some stuff we couldn’t stand to sell,” Greco says, “and did what we had to do to pull the money together to get all the equipment we could.”

He launched Neutron Ninja, packed a trailer with enough equipment to build a midsize course and started booking fairs and festivals. He set up at the Ostrich Festival in Chandler, Arizona, the Larimer County Fair in Colorado and the Illinois State Fair. To events like those he added corporate team building events, fundraisers and even a block party.

“The first year was a success — I’m going to brand it a success,” Greco says. “Not successful enough that I can take the winter off, which is ultimately the goal. But I’m happy to say the company’s debt-free. And that’s how we want to operate.”

Like Maul at Ninja Intensity, Greco figures that the future of ninja — and the businesses that cater to both competitive and recreational participants — no longer depends entirely on the reflected glow of the television series.

Instead, it’s the community, the “ninja nerds,” driving interest.

“I don’t want to say Colorado is saturated, but I think Colorado is a hub for it, for sure,” he says. “Right now I want to focus my energy and my contribution to the sport on helping to get people excited who’ve never seen it before, never had the opportunity to participate. I love introducing it to people and just seeing what kids do.”

With two steps and a hop, Erie’s Taylor Greene springs into the air and grabs something resembling a giant double fish hook. She swings forward and back twice, building momentum, before releasing her grip and flying to a second set of hooks. And then a third, before ending the exercise and dropping to the thick-cushioned floor.

With about 10 of her close friends and fellow competitors, she revels in a sort of free play at Ark Ninja in Longmont, moving among a variety of obstacles and experimenting with strategies for propelling herself through the course. Members of the group — all but one have appeared on the televised “American Ninja Warrior” — take turns working on skills that send them twisting, flying and hanging literally by fingertips, to a chorus of encouraging banter.

At 17, Greene represents a generation of ninjas for whom TV was not the tipping point.

It’s funny that I say the ‘new generation,’ but there’s these 13-year-olds that are coming up and beating some of the very, very top of the sport.

— Taylor Greene, one of the top ninjas in the country

She’d noticed the show in passing, but when a grade-school classmate invited her to a ninja birthday party, she vaulted onto the obstacle course and never looked back. Her childhood gymnastics training transferred well to this new activity. And it also provided endless variations and a lot more fun. She begged her mom to let her start taking classes.

One year later, when she was outperforming 13-year-old boys in her class at age 10, she decided it was time to start training in a more competitive environment. After she turned 11, a video of her racing and beating her adult coach went viral — it’s currently at 114 million views — and she turned pro.

At the time, that meant she was able to compete in events put on by various competitive ninja organizations and accept prize money — anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to $5,000 — but was still too young to appear on the flagship show.

Today, as a high school senior, she’s arguably the top female ninja in the country — and has more than 52,000 Instagram followers. Along the way, she collected enough prize money to pay cash for a brand new Ford Bronco Sport and has become a fixture in the last three seasons of the NBC show. She recently returned from Las Vegas and filming for the next season, sworn to secrecy about the results until after the show airs (seasons generally run in spring or summer).

Even as a 15-year-old rookie, she immediately impressed with a performance that aired last year. As the youngest competitor, she confidently conquered the qualifying course. Announcers noted that while her Instagram handle may be Sweet Ninja Girl, “on the course she is Mean Greene.”

And yet, she’s already looking over her shoulder at rising young competitors.

“It’s funny that I say the ‘new generation,’ but there’s these 13-year-olds that are coming up and beating some of the very, very top of the sport,” Greene says, noting that she started relatively late at age 10. “And it’s crazy, because they’re just so insanely good — they’ve been doing this for almost their whole lives. Ninja has evolved into an actual sport, where people can do this for a very long time, and they can grow up in it.”

The sport’s generational surge has been powered in part by the emergence of facilities like Ninja Intensity in Castle Rock and Ark Ninja in Longmont, Front Range gyms that prioritize development of competitive ninjas with some of the show’s top stars while also cultivating a grassroots love of the activity.

At Ark Ninja, where Greene trains, co-founder Nate Hansen, 25, provides another example of a competitor seizing a business opportunity. Like Greene, he had watched the show but got hooked on the sport through birthday parties. But in his case, it happened through a job hosting ninja parties at a gym in Brighton.

As an athlete, Hansen struggled early when, at age 12, he was diagnosed with growth hormone deficiency. That led to a rough period marked by medication, as he had to give himself nightly injections for his condition. Bullying and difficulty finding a suitable athletic pursuit, one that wasn’t either a bad fit or downright dangerous, also made those early teen years a struggle.

LEFT: Ark Ninja owner and athlete Nate Hansen, 25, right, of Broomfield, and other athletes train at Ark Ninja on October 29, 2024, in Longmont. RIGHT: Jaelyn Bennett, 24, of Longmont, eyes the next handhold. (Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)

TOP: Ark Ninja owner and athlete Nate Hansen, 24, right, of Broomfield, and other athletes train at Ark Ninja on October 29, 2024, in Longmont. BOTTOM: Jaelyn Bennett, 24, of Longmont, eyes the next handhold. (Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)

In 2018 he met top ninja competitor Brian Arnold — he recalls being starstruck to connect with a legend — at the Brighton rec center, where Hansen worked as a lifeguard. Arnold set him up with the gig hosting birthday parties at his ninja gym.

Although still only 5-foot-2, Hansen realized from training after his birthday party shifts ended that he had an aptitude for navigating ninja obstacles. Then, when COVID hit in 2020, he caught a break. “American Ninja Warrior” was one of the few shows that continued filming. When it cast 150 people for a competition in St. Louis, Hansen submitted the requisite performance video and an in-depth questionnaire covering everything from his athletic background to his upbringing.

Hansen won a spot in part, he believes, because of his inspiring personal narrative. It didn’t hurt that he performed well, and that earned him invitations in each subsequent year, including the most recent filming.

His impact on students led him to pursue the business end of ninja. Parents of some of the kids Hansen coached approached him with the idea, and the business savvy, to start a new gym. Some others who trained and coached with him — including ninja stars Greene, Jaelyn Bennett and Austin Gray — also were up for a change.

In the tight-knit ninja world, Bennett, 24, finds herself reunited with Greene, whom she formerly coached in gymnastics. Bennett had been looking for something to be passionate about after her high school gymnastics career, watched “American Ninja Warrior” on TV and felt inspired. She also figured her gymnastics skills — particularly the uneven bars, which were her specialty — would transfer well.

They did, and she has been a regular on the show for the past few years. But she also says that Greene, her former pupil, has become something like her mentor now, as they train and teach at Ark Ninja. And though the facility may encourage a more competitive edge, nothing gets in the way of having fun.

“I would say our training might be a little bit more serious and the environment might be a little more serious,” says Bennett, who also works as a design engineer for a Denver firm, “but we are still a bunch of goofballs.”

On a recent afternoon at Ninja Intensity, Kaden Lebsack is just hanging. Literally.

He grasps the underside of an overhead beam between his thumbs and fingers and seems to effortlessly hold himself in place with the kind of grip strength that can make all the difference when he’s flying through obstacles with names like Spinball Wizard, Jumping Spider and Thread the Needle.

LEFT: Max Feinberg, 20, left, coaches Max “Little Max” Salebra, 13, right, of Castle Rock, at Ninja Intensity on October 11, 2024, in Castle Rock. RIGHT: Max “Little Max” Salebra balancing at Ninja Intensity. (Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)

TOP: Max Feinberg, 20, left, coaches Max “Little Max” Salebra, 13, right, of Castle Rock, at Ninja Intensity on October 11, 2024, in Castle Rock. BOTTOM: Max “Little Max” Salebra balancing at Ninja Intensity. (Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)

But on this day, with Lebsack just returned from a physically taxing road trip to shoot what will eventually appear as the 17th season of “American Ninja Warrior,” hanging from the beam — and casually cranking out the equivalent of pullups — qualifies as taking it easy. In other parts of the cavernous warehouse, his fellow competitors and coaches use a power tool to tighten bolts on the obstacle course and instruct a fledgling ninja through practice runs to polish technique.

Lebsack, along with his core group of colleagues that includes Max Feinberg, 20, and Hans Hertz, 17, have all made names for themselves on “American Ninja Warrior” broadcasts. But here at the gym, they’ve bonded over a common affinity for obstacle courses.

Hertz had watched the show for a couple of seasons, and wound up at Ninja Intensity right after it first opened, for his 10th birthday party. He remembers just wanting to “play on everything, run around and do it all” — and not long afterward, he tried a local competition where a fourth-place finish was enough to keep him coming back.

He proved a quick study on a lot of the basic techniques like swinging, agility and grip strength for difficult fingertip moves demanded by some of the obstacles. He parlayed those skills into success outside the show, including first place at an international competition in the 11-and-under age group.

At 15, he competed on the ANW show — a surreal feeling considering it hadn’t been that long since he was just a starry-eyed viewer. Hertz notes that the early seasons were age restricted to 21 and older (the threshold has since been lowered to 15) and that now “it’s starting to become a young person’s sport.”

“All the younger kids, like me, Kaden and Max, I think we’re the first wave where we’ve started growing up watching the show and then competed on it,” Hertz says. “And now there’s all these young kids who have been watching it since they were 5, and now we’re becoming those people that they watched on the show, those veterans that they want to beat.”

A pervasive sense of community extends well beyond the walls of any one ninja gym. Feinberg represents one (perhaps extreme) example. Like a lot of the ninjas who got into the sport when they were too young to be cast in the primary TV show, he sought competition through a succession of ANW junior events around the country.

That’s where he met the Lebsacks.

Feinberg was living in Virginia at the time, but kept in touch with Kaden and his family. Toward the end of high school, he was traveling to Colorado about once a month for visits and “guest coaching” at Ninja Intensity. Going home began to feel like a disappointment.

So when it came to choosing a college, he quickly narrowed his options to Colorado, and eventually settled on the University of Denver. Now, when he’s not working out and coaching at Ninja Intensity, he’s majoring in marketing — a choice that already has had real-life applications as he helps Lebsack grow the Bucket of Chalk venture.

Ten years ago, ninja was so small that really, everybody knew everybody … and so as the sport has grown, the idea of community still hangs over.

— Max Feinberg, ninja warrior and entrepreneur

Those kinds of connections nurtured a culture that many competitors describe as unique to ninja, perhaps because of its niche as a relatively small sport trying to grow its brand. Feinberg suspects that close relationships forged years ago in the early stages of ninja’s development eventually became baked into the current sense of community.

“Ten years ago, ninja was so small that really, everybody knew everybody, and everyone was just working to grow the sport together,” he says. “And so as the sport has grown, the idea of community still hangs over. If you go up and talk to someone about an obstacle on a course that you’re trying to overcome together, they’re going to be extremely friendly, and you just made a friend for life.”

That story repeats itself at gyms all over.

“It just creates this welcoming and positive environment,” Ark Ninja’s Hansen says, “where it’s not a competition, per se, but it’s more like, ‘Hey, let’s grow together. Let’s learn together. Let’s have fun together.’”

However supportive the culture, however great its appeal from the recreational level on up, ninja remains rooted in competition.

One concept catching fire: Ninja has embraced more one-on-one races. While that delights viewers and excites some competitors, others see the move putting a new wrinkle in the sport’s all-for-one ethic.

Hansen sees both sides: While he prefers the traditional format and thinks it’s important to “hold that brand together,” he also understands as a business owner that racing has potential to grow the sport and make it attractive to a wider audience.

“A lot of ninjas prefer the athlete versus the course, rather the athlete versus the athlete,” he says. “From an entertainment standpoint, I think it’s a lot more fun to watch two people that go side by side and challenge each other. It’s possible that Taylor and I could race each other on a side-by-side course. I think that makes it insanely entertaining from a viewership standpoint.”

And the emergence of so many local stars speaks to Colorado’s place as a hub much like Texas, Florida and some hotspots in the Northeast.

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Lebsack’s Bucket of Chalk competition, which normally unfolds each October, was pushed back this year because of Ninja Warrior filming. But he still anticipates about 200 entries for the Nov. 23 and 24 event and calls it “probably the biggest pro competition outside of the show.”

Beyond that standalone gathering in Castle Rock, three primary organizations put on competitive events outside the NBC juggernaut. Ninja Sport Network, Ultimate Ninja Athlete Association and the World Ninja League all have a major presence with slight variations in their approach. In the background, the possibility of obstacle racing at the Olympics has begun to take shape, as the modern pentathlon will feature those skills at the 2028 Games.

While the competitive ninja world sorts itself out, the athletes continue to train, teach and grow their sport. Back in Longmont, Jaelyn Bennett takes her turn on the Ark Ninja course, testing her grip on a succession of challenging “bogies.” She swings to each of these narrow ledges and clings with one hand in a test of what ninjas call contact strength — the ability to firmly grasp something the moment they touch it.

As Bennett explains, there’s no secret to the technique beyond one simple rule that governs her sport.

“Be strong.”

Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.

Kevin Simpson is a co-founder of The Colorado Sun and a general assignment writer and editor. He also oversees the Sun’s literary feature, SunLit, and the site’s cartoonists.A St. Louis native and graduate of the University of Missouri’s... More by Kevin Simpson