The first time Karen Potts saw “American Ninja Warrior” on television at age 10, she thought it seemed like child’s play — literally.
“I found it super cool,” she said. “It was climbing around for fun, swinging as a sport. As a child, you’re always climbing up things, climbing up trees. That’s something that really appealed to me. It was a structured version of climbing and swinging around.”
That’s a pretty accurate description of “American Ninja Warrior,” the reality competition series in which sprightly athletes parkour and flip their way through a super-sized, difficult and very fast obstacle course. The show started in Japan, but was popularized in the States by the NBC show that airs Mondays.
Almost a decade after North Potomac native Potts, now 19, became fascinated with it, she’s regularly among the professional swingers and climbers. This season, she made her second trip to the show’s finals in Las Vegas before succumbing to an obstacle called the “Jumping Spider.” But that doesn’t deter her.
“Falling comes with it,” said Potts, who was a multiple-sport athlete at Rockville’s Thomas S. Wootton High School and now plays softball at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University, where she’s studying nutrition and psychology.
There’s something so effortlessly fearless about Potts, who I chatted with on Zoom. Her TV journey started on the show’s “American Ninja Warrior Junior” offshoot in 2019, before making her debut in the big show in 2022 at just 16 years old.
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Talking to her reminded me how grateful I am for the climate in which she’s grown up, where it’s no big deal for girls to participate in any sport they want, whether they’re awesome at it like Potts or just curious to try. It’s a world much different than mine.
I was born in 1971, one year before the enactment of Title IX, a federal civil rights law that prohibits gender-based discrimination in opportunities for education and related activities. Only 1 in 27 girls played sports before that critical ruling, according to the Women’s Sports Foundation. Now that number is 2 in 5.
That’s a wonderful thing, because even after Title IX, I still felt like the gates for women in sports were high and vigilantly kept while I was growing up.
It’s not that there weren’t female athletes when I was a kid. I was obsessed with gymnast Nadia Comaneci and the late track and field goddess Florence “Flo-Jo” Joyner. And we had girls sports in high school. It’s more that it seemed that for ladies, you were either an athlete or you weren’t — which is to say that if you weren’t excellent, you weren’t encouraged to go out for a team just because it seemed fun.
It did not occur to me until I was in my 20s that I liked to run and was pretty decent at it. It made me sad I never tried out for the track team. I actually hadn’t even ever thought about it; I was an artsy writer kid, not a jock, and you sort of seemed to be steered to be one or the other as a girl. It was completely different for my male friends who tried out for sports even if they didn’t excel at them — perhaps because no one told them they couldn’t.
I love that this probably doesn’t make sense to Potts’ generation and the ones that follow, who have been raised in a world of Serena Williams and Simone Biles and the WNBA. My son, who is nearly 11, recently watched “Young Woman And The Sea,” the Disney+ show about the first woman to swim the English Channel. It takes place in the 1920s, a time when many believed the female body could literally not handle athletics, which could harm their reproductive organs. My son couldn’t wrap his brain around why I was so moved by the movie that I cried, or that it was ever a big deal for women to be athletes.
“What do you mean, girls couldn’t do sports?” he kept asking. “Girls do sports!”
Yes, they do, including “American Ninja Warrior,” which seems terrifying to me but to which Potts was drawn because of its challenges. It’s heartwarming to imagine this brave little 10-year-old kid watching people flinging themselves through the air and saying, “Yeah, I wanna do that” — because there’s no reason she couldn’t.
“It’s not you against someone else, but you against the course: How fast can you do the course? How fast did you do it last time? It’s not too scary,” Potts assured me. But training for the sport was difficult because there isn’t a large “Ninja Warrior” community. “I was driving an hour and a half each way up to Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, to a gym called Dexterity Depot. That was challenging — and having nobody to train with. In some bigger Ninja areas, groups of friends and partners train together, and that keeps it fun.”
Not one to be deterred, the teen made a little course in her yard to train on and stay disciplined. That helped create Potts’ own version of community: Being involved in “Ninja” led to “traveling for competitions, and having friendships with people from different parts of the country, she said. “It really makes it a lot of fun to go to.”
I was struck by how often Potts used the word “fun” during our conversation. It’s clear she really enjoys it, and the running and climbing that attracted her to the competition as a kid still makes her happy, even though she takes it very seriously. She also takes seriously her position as someone whose presence makes “Ninja” a possibility for other girls.
“Watching the show, I always looked up to the women on it, and getting to be on it myself and be a role model for younger girls is good,” she said. “I’ve been coaching ‘Ninja’ classes, and there are other coaches who are girls, too. So it’s good for them to see us do this all as a girl.”
Potts didn’t make it past the Jumping Spider this time, but she is hoping she can take a few weeks off class so she can try to compete again next year. I asked her if she had advice for anyone who might consider throwing their hat and body into the “Ninja” arena.
“I would say to try it first and stick with it,” she said. “It’s different for me than other sports, because those are more structured. For me, this is all about having fun.”
Of course, Potts also happens to be having fun with something she’s great at. I just hope that there’s some young woman somewhere watching her who decides to try this or any sport just for the fun of it. Just because she can.
