Six long months of training.
 
Three weeks of competition that just fly by.

With no quarterfinal round to strive for anymore, 10 Grand Canyon University CrossFit members took their shots in The Open portion of the newly revamped 2025 CrossFit Games. Out of over 230,000 men and women across the globe to compete in the worldwide event, Lopes' Student Head Coach Dominic Brink, Lopes' Student Assistant Coach Ava Jeziorski and grad student Ethan Crecco all landed in the top 60,000 of the competition. Nearly all of the Lopes' competitors went through the workouts while Brink, Jeziorski and Crecco went through their repetitions on an online stage from CrossFit Sandstorm in north Phoenix over a three-week period dictated by the event organizers.
 
With the worldwide competition seeing lower numbers of competitors in recent years, the competition was redone to eliminate the quarterfinal round, and only allow athletes to qualify for spots in the semifinal round (the top 1% of the competitors). That had to come as a disappointment to Jeziorski, since as a Lopes' freshman last year, she became one of the first two in the program's history to reach the quarterfinal round. Undeterred, the sophomore from Manhattan, Illinois, recovered from a slow first round to narrowly miss finding her way into the top 20,000 females, finishing among the top 13,000 in the final round with her 200 reps.
 
Meanwhile, Brink and Crecco went into the competition trying to "save their best for last", since Crecco graduated after the fall semester, and Brink graduated two weeks ago. Both competitors were hamstrung, though, by missing one of the three rounds, which for Brink, who was near the top 12,000 after Round 1, and placed inside the top 20,000 in his final go-round, missing Round 2 relegated him to 42,233^rd place. For Crecco, who was back at a CrossFit gym in his native Ohio for the competition, he built steam in the first two rounds, hovering around 40,000^th place for each, but no score in the 3^rd round sent him to a finish of 58,312.
 
"Each year, it is such a pleasure to watch them compete as each year we move better, lift better, and have more competitive and developed mindsets about the sport," said Brink. "Since I believe we are the only college-affiliated CrossFit "team", it is cool to see that even while we are small, we can hang with the rest of the world. I would love to bring the fundamentals and the community aspect of CrossFit to the on-campus community by getting involved more with students on campus to promote the club and spread how fun group fitness can be. It is awesome and humbling to be a crucial part in someone's fitness journey and to be a part of their successes and failures!"