Modern-day ninja

Chase “Cricket” Davis has always been active and adventurous — it runs in the family. His mom is a yoga instructor and rock climber; his dad is a rock and boulder climber and guide; his brother is an avid adventurer in Colorado; and his sister is a missionary who lives in the jungle in New Guinea, New Zealand.

In March, Chase Davis had the ultimate test of strength: completing a series of obstacles for the popular TV series, American Ninja Warrior. 

Chase said he grew up climbing as a kid and then transitioned to working at a climbing gym, as well as practicing hot yoga and mountain biking whenever he got the chance. He said he works out a lot with both his mom and dad. 

“We have a good time,” said Dusty Davis, Chase’s father. “We’ve been blessed with healthy, strong bodies. We race motorcycles; we climb rocks. We used to paddle kayaks a lot during the summer. … We are kind of ‘out there,’ a domesticated Vestavia family,you know.”

Although Chase Davis, a 22-year-old graduate from Highlands College, was born in Oregon, he said he’s lived in Vestavia Hills long enough to call it home. While Chase Davis was at a shift at High Point Climbing and Fitness on U.S. 280, he saw an ad telling people to send in an audition video and try out for the ANW. His aunt in particular, he said, really encouraged him to try out.

“I’d seen the show before, and I was like, ‘That looks like a giant jungle gym, and I would like to play on that,’” he said. “... I just had a bunch of people who encouraged me, and I thought it would be fun, and it was fun.”

Each year, ANW invites people from all over the country to enter and be part of the TV show through audition videos. ANW then narrows down the entries and holds first competitions in five major cities before they narrow the list of winners further and host the finale round in Las Vegas. The point of the competition is for participants to try to make it through a series of difficult athletic and strength-based “ninja-like” obstacles with the goal of doing it in the fastest way possible without falling or touching the ground.

Chase Davis got the call in early March that he had been chosen to come compete on ANW in Atlanta on the weekend of March 23, along with about 100 other contestants. He said at the time, he had forgotten he had even sent the video since it had been due on the first day of the year.

Dusty Davis said his son was selected from 70,000 to 80,000 people.   

“Someone called him back and was like, ‘We liked your video. You looked really unique, you got a little story, and we want you to come,’ so that was really cool to get an actual callback,” Dusty Davis said. “We were way stoked. We were all just laughing — we wanted to test the validity, like was it a real call? And then emails started flooding in, and we were like, ‘Yep, it’s legit. You’re on.’”  

After the call, Chase Davis said he had about three and a half weeks to train before the competition in Atlanta. He said he largely kept his workout routine the same, with the addition of traveling to Atlanta five times to use their “ninja gyms,” which have unusual and difficult obstacles and objects that are often used on the show.

“It was really weird running up one of those obstacles when you’ve never done it before, so it was really good to go do that,” Chase Davis said. “[My friends] were super excited.”

The ninja gym contained things like a warp wall, which he said is really hard and daunting if someone has never tried it, though he got the hang of it after practicing a few times. 

Some of the obstacles on the show, he said, look a lot easier on TV than they actually are in real life.

“The one I went to had spinning wheels you could run across, those were fun, [and] helped you with balance and stuff. They had a lot of obstacles, and if you added those together, it was like practice for the real thing. Of course, you don’t know what’s going to be on the real thing, so you might as well practice everything,” Chase Davis said.

Chase Davis said he was really nervous before the competition, and he kept going over what could happen over and over in his head. Waiting, he added, was the hard part, but that’s where the support of his family came in. 

His immediate family, along with his aunt and cousin, drove to Atlanta to be part of his designated number of family and friends who were part of the film audience. They were allowed to watch and cheer him on, he said, and they wore T-shirts and made posters that said “Go Cricket!”

Dusty Davis said the competition was this “quirky and novel thing,” and especially interesting to the family because none of them really watched TV.

“Most of our life, we’ve never even had a TV. We don’t have one now,” Dusty Chase said. “It was kind of this irony that we didn’t know that much about the show. We were aware of it, we’ve probably seen highlights on YouTube, but we weren’t following [it].”

Dusty Davis said he noticed people with a climbing background like Chase seem to do “really well” on the show, due to their grip strength and strength-to-weight ratio. He also said Chase had excellent balance because of how much he walks on slack lines.

“I have this guess that there’s more climbers now, and a lot of the previous applicants have been CrossFit, weight-lifting or maybe gymnasts, also. Maybe he was a little bit of an outlier,” Dusty Chase said. “He doesn’t work out at a ninja gym; he’s not a ninja gym owner; he doesn’t do weightlifting, CrossFit kind of stuff, wasn’t a gymnast.”

Chase Davis said he’s excited to see the show air, even though at the time, he will be studying film at the University of the Nations.

ANW airs Season 11 on May 29 on NBC. For more information, go to nbc.com/american-ninja-warrior.