As Boulder plans its reopening, which the county has now pushed back to May 11, gyms and close-contact training facilities plan their re-entry.
Boulder by nature draws a health-focused community, with all of the climbing and hiking, opportunities for winter sports and holistic-focused businesses. [xxx find out what percentage of businesses are fitness-based. call city person.] Though a huge portion of the industry has pivoted to online offerings, and have continued to find success through the quarantine because, the prospect of reopening back up to full capacity looks like a long and winding road.
The virus isn’t going anywhere; everyone will eventually either get it or get the vaccine, and until then, gyms have to come up with strategic phases of reopening while considering varied opinions.
Easton Training Center, a local martial arts academy specializing in Muay Thai, a striking sport, and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, ground-based grapling, has recently sprouted to 9 schools across Colorado, opening up their newest academy in Longmont just before COVID struck.
Originally founded in 1999 by Amal Easton after he returned from several years of training with the renowned Gracie family in Brazil, and bought into by his student and former UCF fighter Eliot Marshall, Easton Training Center has drawn all kinds of people to its community including Rosetta Hall’s CEO Donovan Greene, Rocky Mountain Regenerative Medicine’s Vassily Eliopoulos, River and Wood’s Josh Dinar who also co-owns Boulder’s T|ACO and publishes DiningOut Magazine.
The administrative team, lead by its president Mike Tousignant and two other academy GMs, Ian Liberman and Vallore Caballero, held an All-Hands staff meeting live on YouTube this past Friday to address how they planned to handle the coming reopening to normal operation.
Since Easton operates a training school focusing on close-combat sports rather than a standard gym, the human-contact element is much higher. In planning its reopening, the academy has followed the government’s COVID regulations as a guideline, but has looked to the entire BJJ and MT community across the country so as to stay as socially responsible as possible. Easton’s reopening will happen in phases.
The academy, home to a massive community that previously encompassed 1% of Boulder’s population alone, has lost 50 percent of its members due to COVID’s freeze and has had to scale its staff back from 130 employees to 18. The academy jumped on both the PPP and EIBL loans the moment they became available, going to several different banks before finally ending with Denver’s Central Bank & Trust where they got approved for the PPP loan just an hour before the money ran out.
Reintegration + the fight
Some things Easton plans to implement into Phase One of its reopening at the allowed ten-person capacity will include no locker rooms, heightened availability to hand sanitizer on the mats, a “No Touch” sign, a limit of three training partners per group in class, and classes ending fifteen minutes early for live training.
People would come in dressed for class and go straight to their taped-off section of the mat. With the instructor accounting for one of the ten-person cap, classes will cap at 9 students, who will work in groups of three. If one person from that group gets sick, then the others who worked with them won’t be allowed to train for a while. Nothing has yet beet set in stone, and the team is still evaluating the best ways to quantify and track the contact and process, but one thing came over loud and clear: they’re thinking about everything.
“We are not standing still,” said president Mike Tousignant. “We are working with bankers and attorneys, and gathering all of the information we can to make a decision.”
With many elements still unknown — like how the virus or vaccination timing will pan out — many gyms move forwarded by making the most educated decisions with all of the information they have. Much of this movement forward, Mike said, will involve operating in the “grey,” with phases oscillating if need be, like heading into Phase Two but then going back to Phase One if there’s a spike in something, and so on.
“We’re martial artists,” Mike said. “We can drill the moves and the technique but when you fight, it rarely ever works in black and white. There’s a whole world of grey that you find the move in. This is our fight.”
Luckily, while the academy has lost membership, it has not lost heart or hope. Its online classes continue to grow, with over 50 people in its Kids Zoom classes, 47 in a recent Jiu Jitsu class and over 40 in its Muay Thai classes. It seems that this pivot to a virtual model has proved more than just a “fix;” it has actually opened new doors within Easton’s business.
Moving forward, Easton’s owners and administration plan to keep the online system going, setting up a camera on the mats to film each class so that people have the freedom to take class from home.
When the academy does open, it will add classes, and employees, gradually.
The biggest discussion on the table is first and foremost, safety and security. While many details still need tweaking, like how the academy will prioritize class sign-ups and other logistics, the team feels more confident that they will succeed.
“We created an entire new business in two weeks with volunteers and support from students,” said Mike. “I feel better and stronger now than I did going in because of how strong the team is and how good we’ve become at dealing with crisis.”
Header image: Screenshot from Easton’s live all-hands meeting last week.
