Five Years!
Half a Decade
On March 1st, we celebrate five years as a gym, and jeez has time flown by. I cannot start without first giving a huge thank you to all of our members and coaches–past and present. Without you all, your support, and your commitment to building a strong community and fight team, none of this would be possible. So thank you!
We started as a small scrappy gym, with nearly as much visitor seating space as there was mat space–as we could only afford so many mats. Most of the gear was second hand, and we were both working nearly full time jobs. The gym hit its year one goal of 100 members, only to be shut down two weeks later by COVID and drop back to 12. Rough times.
Today, many of our founding members are still here, with the Guerraty family maintaining their accolades of longest running members, after randomly popping into our grand opening party and signing up–much to our surprise! Our fighters have won national tournaments and Full Rules Muay Thai belts, with the fight team maintaining a strong winning record. The expansion has proven successful, with more classes on the schedule and additional S&C opportunities with our partner gym, StrengthHaus. Our former fighter and coach, Alex Tyler, has even taken some of the Juniper legacy down South, now operating his own gym, Temple Muay Thai, in Asheville, NC.
We’d like to thank a couple people in particular for really helping Juniper Muay Thai flourish:
-Coach Casey for her continued leadership as a role model in the gym and greater Muay Thai community–leading our Women’s program, reffing and judging local fights, and being a voice of reason as we grow Juniper;
-Jon and Molly, as well as the rest of the StrengthHaus team, for being great partners in this space, and helping our members get stronger and prevent injury;
-Our entire assistant coaching staff–Casey, Kartinya, Mike, Emily, and G–for their commitment to maintaining a high quality product at Juniper;
-Our fight team, especially the very active ones, who strongly represent our gym in the ring and trust us with their health and fight careers;
-And lastly, all of the coaches of Joe and myself, who didn’t just teach us to fight, but also taught us how to be martial artists and better people.
Our goal is to keep getting better. Continue to improve our win percentage while also advancing our fighters to higher levels of competition. Grow our membership base, tweak and better the gym’s format, and keep it as a space where a wide range of people with different goals, abilities, and backgrounds can train.
We like that our gym is a space where people can forget about the craziness of their personal lives and the world, and crack pads–or eachother–for a couple hours. That drama, politics, and all of the other divisive things in this world are left at the door, and people can simply train. This inherently requires the buy-in of our members, and for that we are thankful.
To many more years!
George and Joe
