Teen soars high in weightlifting, CrossFit contests

Jaxon Babb is a lean, mean, teen fitness machine.

Though he’s just 17, but he’s already throwing his weight around in the competitive world of weightlifting – “world” being the operative word. 

After qualifying for Olympic weightlifting nationals by a mere point, Babb competed in Las Vegas earlier this month, placing fourth in his division among guys with as many as eight years more experience.

But Olympic weightlifting isn’t Babb’s game – at least, not originally. His passion is CrossFit, a combination of weightlifting and gymnastics (a broad category that includes running, rowing and swimming). 

You might say he’s pretty good at it, too. Babb is currently ranked 85th in the world in the 16- and 17-year-old division of the CrossFit Open. The semifinal round ended March 25, and Babb is now one of 200 athletes who will compete for 10 spots at the CrossFit Games, a worldwide competition broadcasted on ESPN.

Babb’s success has come quickly, as has his liking for the sport. Less than three years ago, he would’ve preferred nearly any activity to working out. 

He was around 11 when his parents, Torrey and Heather, began taking CrossFit classes. Eighteen months later, they bought the gym. 

“She drank the Kool-Aid right away,” Torrey said of his wife. “And I liked the business model of it.”

Jaxon didn’t like anything about it.  

“Soccer was my sport,” he said. “They made me go. I absolutely hated it. I did not want to be there.”

Still, for two years, he went to the gym, but only because Heather made it a physical education requirement of his homeschooling.

Babb had just turned 15 when his dad signed them up to compete in the 2016 Granite Games with his grandfather, Frank Walker.  

Out of 60 teams, “Three Gen” placed 59th, and they likely would’ve finished dead last if the other team hadn’t gotten hurt. 

“You’d think that by doing so bad at something you hate, you’d want to be done forever,” Babb said. “But I liked the competition aspect.”

He started trying harder. Going to the gym on his own. Getting stronger. Getting better.

In short, he finally drank the Kool-Aid. 

The following year, Babb returned to the Granite Games, this time “ditching” his former teammates for two new ones, he said with a laugh. They placed better – 28th out of 40 teams. 

Granite Games, held every Labor Day in St. Cloud, Minn., offers Babb’s favorite CrossFit competition – probably because it’s the one he started on, he muses. Pro athletes show up, too.

“It’s like going to a football game and seeing NFL players,” Heather Babb said. “So, for people who are everyday athletes, like us, to see someone like that at a competition is really cool.”

Babb owes much to his mom. She’s a CrossFit coach and also competed in the 2019 CrossFit Open. Next year, she’s hoping to be in the top 200 worldwide in her age group. 

He competed in his first CrossFit Open the following year – “the biggest online CrossFit competition,” he explained. 

By “online,” he means that workouts are announced online, and athletes complete them in their home gyms, before entering their scores online.  

Babb placed 295th in the world in the 14- and 15-year-old division, and the CrossFit Open declared him “the fittest teen in South Dakota.”

Heather and her dad, Frank Walker, also competed that year and rated fittest in their respective age groups.  

Jaxon Babb returned in 2018 to get 408th out of approximately 3,000 others in the 16- and 17-year-old division around the world. 

“The top 200 move on to the next qualifier, so I was kind of bummed because I really wanted to get it last year,” he said. “I basically told myself, ‘I’m going to work really hard next year, because I want top 200.’”

That fall, Heather and Torrey convinced Jaxon and Talix, who’d been homeschooled all their lives, to give the traditional classroom a try. They enrolled in Sunshine Bible Academy, a boarding school in Sioux Falls and Heather’s alma mater. 

Talix fell in love with SBA, and Jaxon went from having never played football in his life to making All-State as a kicker.

He was happy and a bit amused by his football success, but it didn’t make up for the lack of gym access and difficulty following his macros-based diet. After one semester at SBA, his parents agreed that if Jaxon was going to continue to compete in CrossFit, he needed to be homeschooled. 

He returned home and began training for the 2019 CrossFit Open. 

On a lark, the Babbs went to an Olympic weightlifting competition hosted by a friend near Minneapolis in January. Because the sport overlaps with CrossFit, Jaxon knew the two Olympic lifts – snatch and clean and jerk – but he didn’t expect to score high.

And when a coach said, after the competition, that Jaxon may have lifted enough to qualify for nationals, the Babbs thought the coach was joking. 

But Jaxon had lifted 100 kilograms in snatch and 124 kilograms in clean and jerk, for a combined total of 224 kilograms, one more than he needed to qualify for nationals.  

“You’re 17 and going to nationals. You’ve made a believer out of me,” said Jaxon’s Olympic weightlifting coach, Rick Phetsavong. 

On the heels of taking fourth in the 17- to 25-year-old division at nationals earlier this month, Jaxon is moving on to the semifinal round in the CrossFit Open for the first time. 

Now that he’s made his goal of making the top 200, he can’t help but wonder if he could maybe – just maybe – make the top 10. Those lucky 10 who move on to the CrossFit Games. 

Even if he doesn’t, he’s found a lifelong sport that he not only loves, but also excels in. 

“If I could change one thing, it would be to have taken it seriously from the beginning,” Jaxon said. “I love it. I love the competition.”