Built to Last

Oneida gym offers fitness and community

When the owner of a boxing gym in Oneida approached Jonathan Orick to buy it, he accepted the offer almost immediately. “I called my wife, Whitney, and said, ‘Don’t be mad, but I bought a gym,’” Jonathan says now. “That’s when she started hitting me with all the logical questions like, ‘How many members does it have?’”

Reality quickly set in. After they examined the finer details of the deal, Whitney told her husband he had three months to make it work. That was in September 2018.

Fitness first

Nearly six years later, gym membership at Engineered Fitness has grown exponentially with a loyal clientele and a new, 10,000-square-foot building on Paint Rock Road. The 24-hour fitness facility offers every type of workout equipment from cardo to bodybuilding and powerlifting, as well as space for cross-training. Jonathan and Whitney, both certified personal trainers, work with clients online to meet their fitness and nutrition goals. Clients can also hire personal trainers to work with them at the gym.

“Anything you want to do, we try to make a place for it at our gym,” Jonathan says. “Our slogan is ‘Make our gym your gym.’ If you come in, you’re greeted at the door and you feel welcome. We’ve really built that culture.”

Out-of-town visitors to the gym have even commented on the friendliness and accepting nature of the facility, he says. “We get this compliment all the time. They’ll say, ‘It really does feel like a family here.’ Our members are great. They’ve really embraced that family-friendly culture we have here.”

Working on a dream

Growing up in Scott County, Jonathan always played sports. So, when he went to college to study engineering at Tennessee Technological University, he continued to stick to a workout regime focused on weightlifting. “Weightlifting has always just been part of what I did,” he says. “At college, my roommate and I would work out every day.”

When he graduated, Jonathan and Whitney, who were married by then, moved to Murfreesboro, then Knoxville, for work. But after a few years, they decided to return to Scott County to start a family. “We’re both from here, and this is where we wanted to live and raise our kids,” he says.

Jonathan was still commuting from Scott County to Knoxville when he bought the little boxing gym. For months, he would work his eight-hour shift as an engineer before returning to Oneida to greet gym customers and clean up. “I would stay at the gym until midnight,” he says.

None of it wore on him, however. He was way too excited for that. “When I went to the bank to talk about our first gym, the banker asked me why I would want to take it on,” Jonathan says. “He said, ‘You’ve already got a great job.’ I told him that as much as I loved my job as an engineer, I still don’t mind scrubbing a dirty toilet at a gym — that’s just how passionate I am about it, for lack of a better word.”

Today, Jonathan works in Scott County as an engineer — a job he loves. It also enables him to put all the money they make from the gym back into it. “Something we always try to do is buy new equipment each month,” he says. “It might not be much. Some months it may be a few new attachments for our equipment. But other times, like recently, we were able to add four new pieces of equipment. We want to show our members we’re investing back into them. They mean more to us than what we could spend on ourselves. They make the gym, and we want to show them we’re reinvesting in them.”

Help from Highland

Jonathan says Highland Telephone Cooperative has been a great help making his business the best it can be. Engineered Fitness relies on HTC’s Gig-speed broadband service and mesh routers that cover the entirety of the building, which allows Jonathan and Whitney to post on their Facebook page, as well as offer their clients Wi-Fi access.

“It can accommodate up to 100 people, so nobody loses service,” he says. “Highland also set up something at our door — a kind of doorbell — so that when somebody comes in, it rings to let the staff know to greet them if they’re in the back. It’s just a cool touch, and it solved a problem for us.”