09/15/2026
The story behind S.L.A.M. 🥹🫶
Join us Wednesday during open house while we celebrate S.L.A.M. Nation’s 15 year SLAMiversary! 💕
The SLAM Story: 15 Years of Sweat Like A Mother
The SLAM story actually starts before SLAM
Before SLAM was a worldwide family, it was just me on the North Shore of Oahu in 2010... pregnant with my second child, chasing a toddler, and missing the soccer coaching life I’d left behind. Wanting to connect with other moms through movement, I launched my very first idea: "Sunset Stroller Circuit."
It flopped. Completely. Turns out, a surf town wasn't looking for a stroller workout. My grand total of clients? Exactly one mom. 😂 But she and I rocked it together for months!
Shortly after, life shifted. My husband, Tony, prepared to deploy, so I moved back to Connecticut to have our second baby with family nearby. When his deployment ended, we returned to Hawaii for a quick four-month stay before our next military move. But those four months changed everything. Living on the south end of the island this time, I joined a local stroller fitness group, quickly became an instructor, and completely fell in love with the experience. It renewed my sense of hope for a community of my own.
When my husband’s Army career sent us to Columbus, Georgia. I still had that itch to build a community, but before buying into someone else’s franchise, I wanted to try on my own. I found the perfect park and spent weeks practicing classes, many with my sister, Katrina and my sister-in-law, Amy. One of the workouts I was practicing with my sister, I wiped away sweat and said out loud: "I am sweating like a mother."
It hit me instantly. Our slogan for Stroller Strong Moms was born… S.L.A.M. Sweat Like A Mother.
On September 12, 2011, 19 moms showed up for our grand opening Stroller Strong Moms Columbus. I was shocked. And the best part? Most of them came back. We weren't just working out; we were building a lifeline. Right from the start, incredible women stepped up to help me run the chaotic behind-the-scenes pieces and lead workouts with loud, fierce, motivating energy. By the time spring rolled around, I had myself a manager, Brooke Garcia, who helped with EVERYTHING behind the scenes and our very first instructor team was born (which included Julie Morelli who later came back to the SLAM life TWICE as an owner).
At this point, I wasn't dreaming about locations all over the world. I wasn't creating a plan to scale a company. I wasn't thinking about building a national or international brand. I was just having the absolute best time running this awesome local group of moms.
And then the Army did what the Army does. We got orders. We were moving to Savannah, Georgia.
Heartbroken, I asked my husband if I should just shut it down. He gave me a gentle reality check: I didn't have to physically be there for the community to survive. I had built a powerhouse team of women who believed in the mission just as much as I did. Columbus kept running without me, and in Savannah, we built the magic all over again in Forsyth Park.
The Mamas Who Dared To Dream
On September 17, 2012, almost exactly one year after opening Columbus, I opened Stroller Strong Moms Savannah on the beautiful lawns of historic Forsyth Park in downtown Savannah. I was two months pregnant with my third baby, had two babies in tow, and somehow managed to take not one single picture of that first day. 😂 But like Columbus, SLAM grew pretty quickly.
For the next three years, we hosted classes in Savannah, Pooler and Richmond Hill. Once again, an incredible community formed around the workouts, and we built another badass instructor team, many of whom helped carry SLAM far beyond Savannah.
Savannah gave us three incredible years, but military life is relentless—soon, my Columbus and Savannah teams started getting orders to move. Instead of saying goodbye, a new question emerged: What if they took SLAM with them?
Without a roadmap, we created an affiliate model. In 2014, Brooke Whitis opened SLAM Lexington, and Kelli Berger opened SLAM DC. When I couldn’t even fathom growing beyond where I lived, these two dreamed for us. I was humbled by their desire to carry the SLAM mission with them.
While celebrating our growth with opening two brand new affiliates, my move to Monterey in 2015 brought me right back to earth. Opening day on September 17, 2015, at the breathtaking Lover's Point Park saw just seven moms. On several mornings, I would pack up my car, set up equipment at the park, and no one would show up. But Monterey taught me patience. We kept showing up, slowly building until our small community eventually grew into coastal runs, mountain hikes, and deep friendships.
While Monterey was slowly building, my role in SLAM was changing dramatically. I wasn't just teaching classes anymore. I owned Columbus, Savannah and Monterey, while also trying to figure out how to support and grow this brand-new network of affiliate owners. It was a lot. Eventually, I realized that the next stage of growth meant letting go of some of what I had built. In late 2015 and early 2016, I sold SLAM Savannah to Cassie Cercy and SLAM Columbus to Rebecca Paull. Cassie and Rebecca had grown within SLAM, leading incredible instructor teams who already knew and loved those communities. They were ready and willing to carry the torch.
Growing From the Inside Out
During my four years leading Monterey, SLAM exploded as we opened 20 affiliates between 2015 and 2019, all stemming from mamas who moved away from our first few affiliates! Ninety-nine percent of them being owners who were either members or instructors who moved to a new city and couldn’t imagine life without SLAM. This time period marked two milestones for our growth, our first OCONUS community with Katie Provencher in Fairbanks, AK in 2016 and our first international location with Stephanie White in Portsmouth, UK in 2018.
As SLAM grew, something started happening over and over again. Mamas would get orders, move to a new duty station or relocate somewhere new, and they didn't want to leave SLAM behind. They had experienced firsthand what this community could mean in their lives, and they couldn't imagine moving somewhere that didn't have it. The way we grew was very intentional on my part. As we expanded, I made a conscious choice not to advertise business opportunities to strangers. In my mind, I would much rather have mamas who had actually taken SLAM classes, who understood the community and had lived the culture, be the ones responsible for growing it. Because SLAM is so much more than a workout, and I think that's hard to fully comprehend unless you've actually been part of it.
Yes, we work out together. But we also have Moms' Nights Out. Playgroups. Meal trains when someone has a baby or needs help. Book clubs. After-class hangs that last way longer than the actual workout. Relays and races. Fundraisers. Community outreach. Campouts. Adventures. Our kids grow up together. These women aren't just spending an hour a day working out next to each other.
They become each other's people. And their kids become best friends.
That has always been especially important in our military communities. So many of our mamas have navigated deployments, long training cycles, moves across the country or across the world, new babies far away from family and all the uncertainty that comes with military life. Sometimes you arrive somewhere and don't know a single person. And then you find SLAM.
You come for the workout, but pretty quickly someone knows your kids' names. Someone notices when you aren't at class. Someone brings you dinner when you have a baby. Someone invites you over when your spouse is deployed. Someone convinces you to sign up for a race you never thought you could do. Someone helps you through the depths of postpartum depression. And eventually, these women would get orders somewhere else and think, How am I supposed to do life without this?
So they built it again.
And again.
And again.
That's really how SLAM spread. It wasn't a bunch of strangers buying into a fitness concept. It was mamas taking their community with them.
Building the Business Behind SLAM
As more and more mamas wanted to open SLAMs, it became pretty obvious that I needed actual procedures for bringing new owners on board. And I'll be the first to admit, it was a little clunky in those first few years. 😂 I was learning as I went. Every new affiliate taught me something about what the next owner would need, and I started relying on other people who were much better than me at organizing all of those moving pieces.
Eventually, we created a much more organized onboarding process, and when Kelli Berger came on board to handle onboarding new owners, everything started running much more smoothly. We gave new owners the foundation they needed. But the actual building of their SLAM? That was theirs. Affiliates had the freedom to make their own decisions for their community. That independence ended up being an important part of what made SLAM work. We weren't trying to create identical copies of the Columbus classes all over the country. I wanted each owner to understand what SLAM was at its core and then build the community that made sense for her and for where she lived.
There was a framework and a shared culture, but there was also ownership. And behind the scenes, the owners and instructors were becoming a community of their own. A workout created in California could be shared with an instructor in Georgia. An owner trying to figure something out in Texas could ask a question and get advice from owners across the country, or world! The same thing that was happening among the mamas at individual SLAMs was starting to happen among the women leading them. Many longtime owners became mentors to the women who left their communities to open SLAMs of their own, sharing their knowledge, resources and support. That willingness to lift up the next mama and help her succeed became another part of how SLAM grew, with each generation of owners helping to build the next.
We weren't just building individual locations anymore. We were building SLAM Nation.
Coming Home to a SLAM I Didn't Build
In 2019, we packed up and after selling SLAM Monterey to one of my besties, Kattie Stong, we moved to Sanford, North Carolina. For the first time, I didn't have an opportunity to start a SLAM from scratch… one was already waiting for me. Joining SLAM Cameron-Sanford as a member (and soon, an instructor again) was surreal. After watching so many mamas carry SLAM to new cities, I was finally the one moving somewhere new and finding a community waiting for me.
I can't tell this part without mentioning Gaga. Since she now lives in Cam-San half the year, she has become a member of SLAM (after wholeheartedly supporting me from afar through all the years). The SLAM Cameron-Sanford mamas took her in without missing a beat. They cheer for her, sweat alongside her, and treat her like everyone's unofficial grandma whenever she’s in town. Seeing them wrap their arms around her is the ultimate proof that SLAM really is a home for every generation. To SLAM alongside my own mama is a beautiful, full-circle reminder that this village isn't just for us or our kids. It's for all of us, together, for a lifetime.
Around the time I moved to Cam-San, I joined Erin Divinski and Janet Daly in leading more Virtual SLAM classes, a program launched in 2017 by Casie Bucci to connect mamas living far from an affiliate. None of us knew how crucial that screen-based connection was about to become.
Unstoppable Community & Growing Beyond the Stroller
Then came 2020. SLAM was built on physical togetherness… sweating in the park, playgroups, and post-workout hugs. Suddenly, we couldn't gather.
Like everyone else, we pivoted fast, moving our park workouts onto screens. But here’s what still floors me: in the middle of a global pandemic, we grew. Between 2020 and early 2021, 13 new SLAM affiliates opened. When the world locked down, mamas still stepped forward to bring SLAM to their towns. It proved that SLAM was never just about the park or the workout… it was about the relationships holding us together.
Our COVID pivots helped many affiliates realize they could host classes online as part of their offerings. As a result of COVID, many SLAMs developed SLAM At Home or SLAM The Alarm to expand their reach to working mamas in their area.
By 2022, our community had naturally grown far beyond where we started, and our affiliate owners made it loud and clear: they were more than ready for a change. They saw every single day that our classes had evolved into so much more than just a stroller workout.
So, with their enthusiastic backing, we officially rebranded from Stroller Strong Moms to S.L.A.M. Sweat Like A Mother, swapping our original "stroller lady" logo for an iconic sweat drop shaped like an S. It was time for the name of the business to catch up with what we had already become.
This change signaled a powerful truth: S.L.A.M. is for every woman. Whether you’re a plant or dog mom, pregnant, newly postpartum, navigating perimenopause, or a proud grandma, you belong here. We all S.L.A.M. together.
SLAM Owners Under One Roof
By 2024, S.L.A.M. owners were leading communities across the country and around the world, but many of us had never actually been together in the same place (aside from that one time in 2018 we ran across Georgia together)
So we changed that.
With the help of two of the best planners in the world, Sarah Staab and Kelli Berger, we held our very first SLAM Owner Retreat, and 22 owners from across the world traveled to my home in North Carolina. We learned, shared ideas, worked out, laughed A LOT, hiked through the woods for our March for Maternal Mental Health and had a ‘Wig Out’ Karaoke Moms' Night Out, because obviously. 😂
Looking around at all of these women, each leading her own SLAM community, was pretty incredible. And that weekend reminded me that the same thing that makes SLAM special for our members makes it special for our owners, too. They had become each other's people.
Thank You To All The Powerhouse Women
Before I thank all the women who have helped carry SLAM into their own communities, I have to thank my sister, Katrina. She has been here since before SLAM even had a name, helping me practice workouts in a Georgia park when this was still just an idea. For 15 years, she’s given me business advice, cheered me on, and wholeheartedly supported this mission. Whether online or in person, she SLAMs whenever she can... purely out of love, belief, and sisterhood.. She's been in my corner since before day one. 💙
Looking back over the last 15 years, what makes me proudest isn't just the workouts… it’s the incredible bravery of the women who built this alongside me. Over one hundred fifty mamas have stepped up as affiliate owners to put themselves out there, launching new communities in unfamiliar cities, or saying yes to take on ownership to carry an existing SLAM.
Some of those locations have since closed, but I am endlessly proud of every single mama who took that leap. Others have passed the torch, handing their communities over to new owners so the local village could keep thriving. A few ambitious mamas have even owned multiple SLAM locations due to military moves, either bringing the magic with them by opening a new SLAM or taking ownership of an affiliate from a previous owner: Bridget Hall, Kelli Berger, Katie Provencher, Cassie Cercy, Lauren McKinnon, Casie Bucci, Meghan Argo, Jessica Hamel, Amy Habrack, Steffi Noland, Laura Sasala, Rosa Stevens, Julie Morelli, Erin Sattler and Lauren Roark.
And I have to give a special shoutout to my own sister-in-law, Amy Habrack, who has been right there with me from the beginning. She supported me in those early days, SLAM’d alongside me in Savannah, and in 2016 tried to bring SLAM to PCB. And just like my first attempt in Hawaii, it didn’t take off. But she tried again in 2018, and this time built a thriving community of mamas who love each other deeply. She went on to open Lynn Haven in 2023, later sold it, and this year celebrates eight years as a SLAM owner. My own SIL, still right here beside me after all these years. 💙
So many mamas have been owners for 5-10 YEARS, many here since the early days of SLAM and most are STILL here y’all: Amy Habrack, Lindsay Platky, Erin Divinski, Malia Gardella, Sarah Smalley, Cortney Hawks, Kara Daniels, Natalia Gusching, Amy Schwartz, Alexis Ward, Rebecca Paull, Apryl Lee, Kathryn Fanning, Jemima Tulloch, and Jess Hamel. So many instructors and members have been involved in our community for equally as long, many of them participating at multiple SLAM locations! (I want to hear about y’all in comments… keep reading!)
And then there’s Kelli Berger. Kelli has been part of this story since day one in Savannah in 2012. She started as a mama, became an instructor, helped bring YLAM and run programs to life, opened SLAM DC and Clarksville, built our owner onboarding process, and today is my Operations Manager and the person who keeps so much of SLAM Nation moving forward. She’s also the one who pushed me to finally sit down and write this story. 😂 There is absolutely no way SLAM would be where it is today without her. Kelli, thank you for believing in this thing, for helping me build it, and for still being right here 14 years later. 💙
Thank you to our incredible experts who continue to help us grow stronger, healthier, and more informed as mama athletes. Registered Dietitian Brittany Hampton and Pelvic Floor Physical Therapist Addie Holzmann have shared endless education, guidance, and expertise with our community over the years. SLAM and our mamas are stronger because of them. And Erin Divinski, whose workout knowledge and programming expertise have helped shape Virtual SLAM for nearly a decade. Erin pours her heart into making sure our workouts go way beyond simple exercise... she crafts programming designed to keep female bodies strong, capable, and undeniably powerful through every stage of life. Thank you to Katrina Morgese who has helped us as an expert in merchandise and Gabby Tullis who helped us with social media, both dedicating years to making SLAM better. Brittany Bass for pumping out every single beautiful new affiliate logo. And Autumn, our patient and kind screenprinter who has been pumping out thousands of pieces of merch you've seen us sporting for years.
We Became The Movement
Members became instructors. Instructors became owners. Owners built teams. Mamas brought friends. Kids grew up at SLAM. Relays were run. Babies were born. Meals were delivered. Deployments were survived. Moves were made. Friendships became family.
And little by little, SLAM became something I never could have created by myself.
Every woman who showed up, every instructor who stepped up to lead, every owner who took a chance on bringing SLAM somewhere new, and every mama who welcomed another mama into this community helped build what it is today.
What started as one mom trying to figure out how to keep doing something she loved after becoming a mama became thousands of women reminding each other that athleticism doesn't end when motherhood begins.
We came for the workout.
We found our people.
And somewhere along the way, we became The Movement.
Fifteen years later, I'm still here teaching, learning, and dreaming up what's next. Still cheering my heart out for every single mama.
And still, always, Sweating Like A Mother right beside you mamas.
Now I want YOUR S.L.A.M. story. 💙
I shared one throwback photo with this story: our very first instructor team from 2012. But I know there are thousands of photos and stories that make up these 15 years, and I want to see them ALL.
If you've been here 15 years or 15 minutes, drop a photo in the comments.
Give me the babies who came to class in strollers who are teenagers now. 😭 Give me you and your besties doing hard things together. Give me the old-school S.L.A.M. tanks, the first-day photos, the sweaty selfies, the race weekends, the playgroups, the Runs Across Georgia, the MNOs, the Ragnars, the PCS goodbyes and the reunions.
Give me the friendships across SLAMs, the babies, the ridiculous moments and the memories you've probably forgotten were sitting in your camera roll.
Show me YOUR piece of this Movement. And tell your story.
Because this story was never just mine.
It's ours. 💙
