Eighteen years of building athletes. One reason why.
Strength & conditioning for young athletes — Davis County, Utah.
Built in a gym. Proven over 18 years.
Strength & conditioning for young athletes — Davis County, Utah.
Matt Byrd has been coaching for eighteen years, and he'll tell you the job hasn't changed once in all that time. Get someone to do the thing they didn't believe they could do. Then do it again tomorrow.
The résumé is real. Owner and head coach of CrossFit Kimokeo in Kaysville for the better part of a decade. Strength and conditioning for BYU Women's Soccer. Official strength and conditioning provider for the Utah Warriors, Utah's Major League Rugby team. Hundreds of athletes trained, from eight-year-olds learning to land a jump to Division I signees to professional rugby players who hit like car crashes. But a résumé only tells you what someone did. It doesn't tell you what it's like to be coached by them, and that's the part people remember.
Ask around Davis County and you'll hear the same stories. The 4:30 a.m. class that called themselves the Crazies and showed up in the dark because Matt already had the lights on. The member who said her most impactful memory was finishing a brutal workout in tears while Matt and two coaches stood next to her and refused to let her quit on herself. The Veterans Day talk he gave that an athlete still brought up months later. The brisket he smoked himself for the gym barbecue, because if you're going to feed your people, you feed them right. That culture was never an accident. Matt builds it the way he builds strength: on purpose, rep by rep, over years.
“Stronger than yesterday.”
The method underneath it is old-school in the best way. Percentages, progressions, testing, deload weeks. Matt learned to program the long way, writing training by hand for hundreds of members with different bodies and different goals, and what survived those years is a simple conviction: shortcuts are the most expensive thing you can buy. He watched what borrowed workouts and YouTube programs did to kids who walked through his doors already hurt. His answer then is his answer now. Find out where the athlete actually is. Build the foundation first. Then build on it.
The kids were always the point. Years before anyone was saying "youth athletic development," Matt was running MoSkillz out of his gym — speed and agility work built around fixing each kid's imbalances so they could hold up in the sport they actually played. Parents kept coming back with the same report: my kid stands differently now. Not just on the field. At school. At the dinner table. That's when it clicked for him. He wasn't in the fitness business. He was in the confidence business, and the barbell was just the tool he happened to use.
CrossFit Kimokeo
Kaysville, Utah. Est. 2013.
Before The Proven Athlete, there was a gym named for Matt's brother.
Kimokeo is Timothy's name in Hawaiian. The night Matt earned his CrossFit Level 1 certification, Timothy was killed in a car accident. His brother's last words to him were, "I can't wait to watch you compete."
Matt built a gym around that sentence. He'll tell you every coach needs a coach, and his never left — when the clock starts and the last five reps are the hardest, the voice he hears is TJ's, yelling at him to pick the bar back up. You didn't let him down. Right back to work. That's not a slogan. That's the man, and the video below is him telling it in his own words.
“Be More Human” — CrossFit Kimokeo, produced for Reebok, 2015. Matt tells the story of Timothy.
What he built under his brother's name became rare. Trunk-or-treats for the kids and costume-mandatory workouts for the adults. Coaches drafting teams for the Open so the whole gym competed side by side. New members interviewed in the newsletter like they mattered, because they did. People came for the workouts and stayed for the feeling of being known and pushed by a room full of people doing the same hard thing at the same hour. The way Matt says it: the sacrificing you do in here together is what makes you a better friend, a better husband, a better wife.
The gym is gone now. What it stands for isn't. Timothy is still the reason Matt shows up, and every athlete who comes through this program is training inside something his brother started without ever knowing it.
