Congratulations to Andrew Watson, MD, on his award of $25,000 from the UW Sports Medicine Classic Fund for his project, “Identifying the Mechanisms of Maturational Differences in Fitness Development in Children.” Although cardiovascular fitness has been shown to be an independent predictor of cardiovascular disease risk, the dose-response relationship between exercise and fitness development in children remains unclear and it has been previously suggested that children have an attenuated response to exercise training prior to adolescence. Under the mentorship of Marlowe Eldridge, MD, this project is intended to identify the existence of a maturational threshold for cardiovascular fitness development in children, as well as the central and peripheral cardiovascular mechanisms responsible for these differences.