Why is the GymRat Challenge considered a must-go event for basketball teams all over North America?

Each GymRat Challenge is a two-day event. The boys play on Memorial Day weekend, while the girls follow up two weeks later.

The weeks leading up to the event are the most critical, and it takes all Kmack’s focus to stay on course.

“I feel like I’m living one day ahead of a straight jacket, from the middle of March to the middle of June,” he said.

“There are days when that thing is definitely gaining on me.”

“It’s organized chaos,” said Tucker Green, Kmack’s brother-in-law and right-hand man when it comes to setting up event facilities.

In the week leading up to Memorial Day, Green, Kmack, and Kmack’s mother, Sheila, all spend hours each day sorting through merchandise and double-checking the staff list. Kmack hosts a last round of meetings with his site coordinators, a group of senior staff and close friends who have helped him run every tournament for over two decades, going over every last detail of the coming weekend, from sales goals to staffing needs and final scheduling tweaks.

Come Wednesday, Green loads everything into a uHaul. On Friday morning he goes from site to site with his moving crew. They stock the concessions, set up the entryways and scorers tables, and cover every facility wall-to-wall in GymRat posters and banners.

Friday evening is when the tournament staff roll into town. Depending on the amount of teams and facilities used that weekend, Kmack employs anywhere from 100-200 people at any given tournament, all of them overseen by his site coordinators. Each coordinator will tell you that the biggest separator of the GymRat from other events is the amount of staff Kmack hires, and how strictly he demands excellence.

“The biggest difference between the GymRat and other tournaments is the amount of staff we put in place to make sure that things are smooth and successful,” said Jeremy Dubay, one of Kmack’s site coordinators and a 22-year GymRat veteran. 
“Every tournament is going to have problems, it doesn’t matter. Could be the parents, could be the coaches, every tournament will have them. It’s how you effectively deal with that, and how you deal with that without ruining people’s weekends. That is the biggest difference between what we do and what other people do.”

Depending on how many teams are competing and how many facilities are in use on a tournament weekend, Kmack will employ anywhere between 100-200 people for his events, filling positions ranging from concessions and ticketing to social media personnel and athletic trainers. Each court has at least three people assigned to it to ensure things run smoothly.

“Compared to all the other events, where you get there and you’re trying to find a scorekeeper to write the names in the book, the refs might be there, but having a coffee in the corner. There’s all kinds of things that can go wrong, like the games don’t start on time or they switch the schedule,” said Hart.

“Those things don’t happen at a John Kmack event.”

“I think hardcore business analysts would criticize me because it adds to our cost model, but there’s reasons for it,” Kmack said.

Kmack and his site coordinators arrive at their facilities the morning of the tournament at 6 A.M., followed closely by the rest of the staff. After running last-second tests on scoreboards and double checking equipment, the doors are opened to the public, with games tipping off at 8 A.M.  The amount of courts at each site will vary, but an average collegiate facility with three courts will see 45 games over the course of the first day. In 2019, at the tournament’s peak before the pandemic, the boys and girls tournaments combined for over 500 teams, with half that number on the waiting list for the next year.

The tournament uses a pool play format where everyone is guaranteed three games, after which cuts are made for what Kmack has dubbed the “Championship Round.” In past events, the GymRat used to put every team that made it to the Championship Round into one bracket. In 2015, Kmack switched up the format to align with changes to the NCAA’s live recruiting period rules, which are times during the college recruiting season where coaches are allowed to be in contact with prospective athletes.

“We went to the bracketed playoff about seven years ago to mirror NCAA live period rules that limit the number of games that can be played in a day,” Kmack said. “The old “survival of the fittest” format was great when we crowned a single champion, but teams were playing six games on Sunday. The change was needed to evolve with the expectations of today’s athletes.”

“It used to be known as a marathon,” said Huerter. “The schedule would set up where if you advanced out of pool play, in order to win your age level, you had to get through a marathon of games.” 

The old format was more about which team could last the longest rather than play the best basketball. The new system isn’t just easier on the athletes’ bodies, but also allows for more parity as similar skill-leveled teams will now face off more frequently. Teams are now slotted into five different tiers dependent upon how they finish: Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Copper. The top six teams from the tournament play in the Platinum round, the next six play in the Gold round and so on. 

Every court at the GymRat Challenge is watched by a court supervisor and a court director to ensure games run on time and to defuse issues before they escalate. The social media teams are constantly running around, grabbing photos and highlight clips to upload to the tournament’s Twitter and Instagram pages. 

Kmack is strict about how frequently these pages get updated. One of the most important goals of the tournament is to give players a level of exposure that is usually reserved for the shoe-company circuits. There are photo ops, interviews, and scouting profiles for each player. Players who have aspirations of playing basketball in college are given a much better chance at reaching their goal.

“Each year we try to take as many teams as we possibly can because I think it’s important to give kids the opportunity to compete in an event like this and see what a difference maker it can be for them,” Kmack said. “The hardest part for me every year is, I feel bad leaving teams out.”

In recent years, Kmack has added talent evaluators to his staff to aid with his exposure goals.

In the past, the court supervisor would also be tasked with finding players who stood out for all-tournament selections. 

All of the data gathered during the tournament are fed into the GymRat Recruiting Index, a recruiting engine designed to help players and coaches connect. 

Kmack had seen the rise of recruiting services for high school athletes, and thought that he could offer them something better.

“I started to look at them, and quite honestly, I thought they were stealing people’s money without providing them any value,” Kmack said.

“It was just a matter of people paying to get their kid in this database that no college coach in the country was ever gonna look at, and they would just send out emails giving people this false sense of hope and this false sense of security.”

Data from more than 20 years of events are archived and stored there. At the end of each tournament, Kmack compiles an event report using the Recruiting Index and sends it out to coaches who have signed up for it. 

Before the internet became mainstream, Kmack would go through every scoresheet from every game and compile the event report by hand, then spend all night at a Kinkos making copies to send out. These days, the GymRat website has a roster input system that coaches fill out when they enter their teams into the tournament. Once the tournament is over, the players’ stats are added into the database for easy access. 

While the GymRat has become much more streamlined and focused over the years, the work weekend is still a grind. Events of this magnitude require precision and an attention to detail that borders on perfectionism, and it‘s easy to lose focus. 

Working for Kmack is not for everyone. His maniacal need to meet self-imposed standards of excellence can make him difficult to deal with.

“I’m definitely a pain in the ass, there is no doubt about that,” he said. “I plead guilty to that all day.”
“Back in the old days, when I would leave one facility, and I would tell them where I was going, they would call ahead to the next facility I was going to see and warn them.”

Bernett Marion, one of Kmack’s longest tenured site coordinators, is also a close friend. His first year working the tournament, Kmack nearly fired him before he could get started.

“The first event I worked for him, I was late and, you know, he yelled at me,” said Marion.

“I had a pretty responsible job on the outside, so I wasn’t doing it for a pair of sneakers and all the hot dogs you could eat, so I did not like it. I didn’t like him. He had prefaced working for him, that it’s a very long weekend, it’s very demanding. I was only like 15 minutes late, it did not matter. He’s a stickler about time and punctuality.”

Marion says Kmack is a different person at the beginning of the tournament compared to the end. The gradual shift in demeanor is what saved their relationship.

“But, you know, as the day went on, a different side of him came out,” Marion said. “I happened to see him on the second day. I was gonna get my check, make sure I never darken his doorstep again. End of the day, some kids were going by the (merchandise) table, you could see the look in their eyes, wishing they could have something, and he told two or three kids, ‘Hey, pick anything you want out.’ And I was like, that’s John Kmack? I had hated his guts up until that point, and from that day on I saw him in a different light.”

Kmack’s abrasiveness around tournament time comes from a personal place. The tournament is his self-image. Anything less than absolute perfection is unacceptable.

“If you go to a nice restaurant, and it’s a nice spot and there’s nice staff, it's a nice restaurant, and you feel a burp coming on, you’re much less likely to let that thing rip,” Kmack said. “But if you’re sitting at Burger King, you’re letting that thing rip. We want to give you that five-star treatment so people know they’ve got to behave a certain way here. There are certain expectations if you come to a GymRat event.”

Watching Kmack work on tournament day is like watching a tornado with an objective. He’s constantly moving around, going from site to site, talking to parents, coaches, referees and players alike, but there’s always purpose behind the conversation. It could be as simple as getting feedback on the event or clearing up a mishap between teams in an especially close game. The littlest things matter, from the way shirts are displayed on mannequins to the way people are greeted when they walk in the door.

Because of the highly stressful environment, tensions between players, coaches, parents, referees, and even other employees are always palpable. At every staff meeting before a tournament is held, Kmack preaches active problem solving and de-escalation skills.

The minute tensions start to rise on a court, you can bet one of the site admins will be there to defuse the situation. During a first round playoff game between Castle NYC and Sting Elite during the girls Challenge weekend this year, a two-point game ended with a referee not hearing a coach’s timeout call after a basket with two seconds left. 
Needless to say, the coach was rather unhappy with the situation and went on a tirade. Two of what Kmack jokingly refers to as his “enforcers” quelled the angry coach before things got too out of hand. 

Once the chaos of the weekend is over and the final trophy has been handed out, Kmack and his coordinators begin tearing down each site. Staff aren’t required to stay behind to help, but for those with the spare time, Kmack thanks them by taking them all out to dinner as a final token of appreciation. 

“Nobody gets rich off of this, including me,” said Kmack. “There’s plenty of other things that they could do to work less hours for somebody who’s less maniacal and make more money, but they all keep coming back. I can’t tell you how appreciative I am of that.”