Team GSP collects powerlifting national championships
· Yahoo Sports
BRISTOL — Continuing to add to their strength while improving their technique, members of Team GSP are achieving on the big stage.
Founded by strength coach and educator Scott Pherson in honor of his infant son, Griffin Scott Pherson, who passed away shortly after birth in 2017, Griffin Sports and Performance LLC trains athletes and sponsors powerlifters who have earned USA Powerlifting national titles. The USAPL sponsors many competitions for drug-free strength sports.
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The three competition lifts are bench press, deadlift and squat.
“In bench, you get a start command and a rack command,” Pherson said. “You have to control the bar to your chest or sternum. You have to pause, then you have to press. Your feet must be touching the ground. Your butt must stay on the bench. We pause to show we have control.
“In deadlift, you walk up (to the bar). There’s both sumo and hybrid. In our program, we stand up fully locked with hips extended and standing tall. Our back, chest and shoulders are (pulled) back. That is a proper deadlift.
“In squat, you have two commands,” he said. “You have to show that you have secured the bar out. In USAPL, you have to walk it back and be standing stall with knees locked. When you get the command, you squat to depth. Your hip crease is below the top of your knee.”
Seven Team GSP lifters went to powerlifting nationals in 2026.
Phoenix, 11, the oldest daughter of Pherson and Lauren Pherson, a Concord Intermediate School teacher, became a three-time national champion in the teen division.
A competitor since age 9, she placed first in 2024 in South Carolina, 2025 in Pennsylvania and 2026 in Chicago. She is heading into the sixth grade at CIS this fall.
With her father being a strength coach, Phoenix Pherson has been around powerlifting her whole life.
What does she like most about it?
“It’s just a different environment than in other sports,” she said. “You’re not hoping someone else loses. You want everyone to compete at their best. You just want to outwork them. Everyone works super-duper hard and stuff.”
Besides powerlifting, Phoenix is involved in volleyball, basketball and softball and has played flag football and soccer.
Grace Marshall, a junior at Concord High School, is a two-time national champ as a teen. Her titles came at Atlanta in 2025 and Chicago in 2026.
Xiomara Salinas, a swimmer and a 2027 valedictorian candidate at Concord, placed second at teen nationals. She took to powerlifting around two years ago. She was in athletics weights class at school. Not long after meeting Pherson she joined Team GSP.
“It started out really small and then it just grew,” Salinas said. She was one of six in the Phersons’ basement being led through speed last Saturday morning.
“I just always loved lifting,” she said. “I thought it would be nice to do a sport related to it. It’s really like an outlet. You leave it all on the bar. I like the team environment. We’re really close. We call each other sisters.”
One of the Saturday morning lifters was Ember Lily Pherson — 7-year-old sister to Phoenix. Ember is to make her competitive debut next year.
MJ Anderson, a freshman who plans to be a multi-sport athlete at Goshen High School, has won youth and teen national crowns with Team GSP.
DeMarco Henry, the strength coach at Ben Davis High School in Indianapolis, trains remotely with GSP and placed fifth at nationals in the open division (all male lifters).
Piper McGregor, a junior wrestler and hockey player at Angola High School, is another Team GSP lifter and was a teen runner-up at nationals.
Zoey Myers, a former prep swimmer and 2024 Concord graduate who works in Penn-Harris-Madison schools, competed in the junior class at nationals in Atlanta and is now training with an eye at regional competition in September.
“Everyone on this team is very much a fighter and an underdog,” Scott Pherson said. “We get after it. We’ve got a lot of people who want to work their butts off and find something with that barbell.”
Pherson, a graduate of Anderson High School, Ball State University and Setanta College in Ireland, has been South Bend St. Joseph High School performance director since May 2025 and just finished a stint as a Beacon Health fitness specialist.
He carries several certifications including a master’s in performance coaching, certified strength and conditioning specialist, registered strength and conditioning coach and performance enhancement specialist.
He just became director of operations for Power Locker — a premium sports vending company. The position will involve remote and travel work.
Beginning in 2021, Pherson was fitness and performance center director at Concord High School for three-plus years.
Before that, he spent four years as strength and conditioning coach and teacher at Columbus East High School.
He is a USAPL state referee as well as the National High School Strength and Conditioning Coaches Association state director for Indiana and an NHSSCA advisory board member. The association presents a memorial scholarship annually in memory of Griffin.
“Our focus is always 100% on technique,” Pherson said. “We’re all about technique and a lot of speed work. We’re also overcoming adversity mentally as well as physically.”
Pherson noted that the current point emphasis with most sports is skill development. But he contends that training must also contain a conditioning component.
“In my opinion, if you’re not developing the strength, agility and everything else that you need, that’s what’s causing this higher rate of injuries that you’re seeing nowadays, especially in female athletics because they’re so skilled,” he concluded.