LACEY – You can’t have “Savage” without “Ava” and Ava Colasanti has been training savagely hard to become an American Ninja Warrior.
The 16-year-old Lacey High School sophomore has traveled to competitions in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and Colorado to reach a spot on the 13th season of the NBC reality show American Ninja Warrior. The show’s season premiere episode is Monday, May 31 at 8 p.m.
The show, which has a reported audience of 35 million viewers, involves some of the nation’s top-rated athletes who take on some very difficult challenges. Ava will face this season’s more than 400 competitors after several years of training.
She started training at a summer camp in Toms River called Basecamp which opened in 2016. She moved her training to Centercourt in Lawrence Township two years ago. Ava began competing in the National Ninja League in 2018-19 season.
Her biggest fans and supporters are her parents Ralph and Kim Colasanti and her 13-year-old brother Nico. Ava is currently ranked fifth among elite females in the National Ninja League standings. The top prize is $1 million.
While her mother is a distance runner, her father is a climber at Gravity Vault in Brick. He also became a pseudo-coach to her and to others at Centercourt. Her brother Nico takes on a support role.
Ava said, “I used to watch the show before all of this. I thought it was so cool how athletes could do all these obstacles. I always told myself someday I would be on the show. When I learned a Ninja base camp was near me, I quickly got started with it and it came naturally to me. I worked hard for years but I got involved in competing within the last two years.
“There is a bunch of different leagues besides the show. There is different age groups and different skills and they have a competition almost every weekend. They have a huge tournament at the end of every season where the whole Ninja community comes to compete to qualify,” Ava added.
“We love watching her compete and seeing how much she has grown in this sport both physically and mentally. She has ‘come out of her shell’ and really has made us so proud with how she handles tough situations and challenges,” her father said.
These challenges only drive her harder, he said. “She dealt with the pandemic and the gym closing for a while which made her lose not just her training but some of her closest friends who lived hours, even states away.”
He added that Ava “dealt with injuries and physical therapy, and most of all her biggest challenge has come from her mental mindset, where she has had to deal with what it was like to have moved from an average athlete to one of the top female teen ninjas.”
Each competitor has their own battle cry. Ava’s was originally, “This beauty is in Beast Mode” but now the pink clad Ninja’s motto is “Savage.” Her family traveled with her to Tacoma, Washington, for the qualifiers. In mid-April she visited Universal Studios in Los Angeles but Ava hopes to reach Las Vegas which hosts the national finals.
Ava said the competition calls for participants to run, catch, swing, jump, climb, and move from place to place with strength, agility, and coordination, and many other skills as well.
“It is an obstacle course. There is so much. Whether it is agility, upper body strength, swings – but it is very familiar to American Ninja Warrior (the TV show) as far as obstacles and having a little bit of everything in it,” her mother said.
“Every competition is different. When we train, we don’t know what is going to be in the competition,” Ava said. “I train every single day. I have a home gym in our garage and am at the Ninja gym four days a week and I climb once a week. I’m constantly doing pushups, workouts, running and I will definitely be running more.”
Ava spends a lot of time training at Centercourt Athletic Club which is an hour away. “I do cross country in school. This takes up a lot of time. Sometimes I can’t go to my cross country meets or practices.”
She caught the interest of the show’s producers with her standings in the qualifying competitions. “They reached out to me as they saw I was winning the national Ninja competitions.” She was not picked to be on American Ninja Junior, a version of the show for those 15-17 years old two years ago but “I trained super hard for almost a year and I started winning just about everything.”
“I knew everyone I competed with before the show,” Ava said. The competition involves five regions with 100 competitors per region. “The semifinals is in Los Angeles and there was four regions there. The top 15 moves on to Las Vegas.
“It was definitely different competing with them on that level because everyone was trying to focus on the course and themselves because it was all our dreams to be there and we are there together for this so it is cool,” Ava added.
Ava said that along with her family, her teachers and classmates were “super excited and they find it super cool. Some of my teachers from 5th grade and in 7th grade reached out to me to say how excited they were.
“It has been very exciting and at first it didn’t feel real to me because being so young I didn’t realize this would happen so fast. I was just so excited the whole time,” Ava said.
While still rather young, in the back of her mind Ava is hoping to one day own and operate a gym with physical therapy and a nutrition program or become a physical therapist.
Ava and her family said an interview segment about her was made for the show but they are unaware of when that segment will air on an episode. They aren’t sure which upcoming shows will feature Ava but they are confident her segments will air by the end of June.
