Fitting Together

If the past two years have taught the Neufeld family anything, it’s that life has a funny way of working out.

Story Rheya Tanner Photos Fred Lopez

June 2020 was set to be a sunny time for Jeremy and Katie Neufeld. Not only were they nally realizing their dream of opening their own gym, but they learned they were soon-to-be new parents. We all know what happened next…

“We found out we were pregnant that February. Then the pandemic hit,” says Katie. “And then we found the space for the gym. So everything was on top of each other.”

While they looked for a space for their gym, Jeremy had been working as a traveling coach, providing personal training to clients at area gyms. When the pandemic hit, the gyms locked their doors. But Coach Jer isn’t the type to throw in the towel.

“I had these members who still wanted a place to work out,” he said. During the summer of 2020, Jeremy turned the tennis courts at Speer Park in Oakland into an outdoor gym for his members. “Fourteen of us worked out there at 6 a.m. every morning. I had dumbbells and weights, and one of my members literally lived across the street, so I stored it all in his garage.”

To endure the turmoil of a global pandemic, a new business, and a newborn—and come out smiling on the other side—it takes a strong, flexible couple. Good thing the Neufelds like getting their exercise.

From Jungle to Gym

Fitness had always been a huge part of Jeremy’s life, having grown up in a relatively healthy home in Ontario, Canada. But the Neufelds’ story begins outside the gym—far outside it, in fact, as the two first met while working as Animal Keepers at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.

Animals were Jeremy and Katie’s first love, their college degrees being in Environmental Science and Zoology, respectively. Jeremy moved to Central Florida from Naples in the mid-2000s, while Katie, a Windermere native, had worked at Disney since high school. In 2015, she was transferred to Jeremy’s department, and the two became fast friends.

“We both were passionate about working with rhinos, and a type of antelope called the Bongo,” says Katie. “We worked together on a lot of projects with those two species, got to know each other, and I don’t know, one thing led to another.”

As their new friendship morphed into love, Jeremy’s longtime love of fitness morphed into a passion. It started with him earning a HardStyle Kettlebell Certification through fitness company Dragon Door, which led him to also earning a CrossFit certification and becoming a CrossFit Coach in 2016. “I would drive to a CrossFit gym and coach on my days off—basically I was working two jobs,” he says. “I knew that was what I wanted to do, but it was a slow, slow build.”

It wasn’t until two years later, with his now-fiancee’s encouragement, that Jeremy finally took the plunge into fitness fulltime. “She was like, ‘look, you obviously love it. The gyms you’re in are really good, but you think you can do it better, and you care about people. So do it.’ That’s where the passion truly switched,” he says. “Animals will always be my love of mine, but I reached a point in that career where I wasn’t learning or growing anymore. And I had this new opportunity to be an entrepreneur and really help people.”

So, Jeremy quit his job at Animal Kingdom to pursue a career in coaching, with Katie following him not long after. He’d already earned some members from his part-time days; now all there’s left to do is open a gym. Easy, right?

The Sun’ll Come Out

As it turned out, Coach Jer’s first obstacle to overcome wasn’t finding that perfect space; it was getting the chance to even see it. “One thing we ran into as a first-time business owner, people don’t really want to take a chance on you,” says Katie. “We’re not a franchise; we don’t have a national brand backing us up. That took us out of the running for a couple of spaces.”

If there was one thing Jeremy and Katie knew about their ideal space, it’s that it would be in Winter Garden. “When I was in school, nobody ever hung out here,” Katie says of downtown. “Seeing all the progress this city has made, and the way the people really value the community, we wanted to be part of that.”

Jeremy continued to be a traveling coach for the solid two years it took for his gym, Sunshine Functional Fitness, to find a home base. “It was a big, gray shell. There was nothing in it for three years, and it was 300 square feet bigger than the space we were looking at before,” he says. “Obviously, not the most ideal to open during the pandemic, but we’d already waited so long.”

Once they got the keys in August of 2020, Jeremy and a very pregnant Katie went straight to work making it their own. “It was the two of us that put down the flooring and got all the equipment. One of my members built these nice storage spaces for us,” says Jeremy. “It was good to have the support of our small community.”

It was that small community that kept them strong during the difficult year. “I had 14 people come with me from the gyms I was coaching at before, so that was a good feeling. And I still had people that would stick with us, that cared about their fitness, and wanted to keep us going.”

After over a year of tumult, Sunshine is nally seeing the growth they hoped to see this time last year. “We call it our snowball—our snowball is getting bigger,” adds Katie. “We’re happy about it because you open a place like this to help people. We love helping the members that we have, but we always want to extend that as far as we can.”

Growing Pains

Because navigating through a pandemic as a new business isn’t complex enough, the Neufelds also had to balance the challenges of parenthood on top of it all. “Obviously, we don’t get much sleep,” says Jeremy.

Their newborn son named Marsden (as a person with a common name, Katie didn’t want her son to have to share his name with a half dozen of his classmates) needed constant attention and care, as babies are known to do, which led Katie to make a shift in her priorities. “Once I gave birth, I really couldn’t be as helpful with the gym as I wanted to. So we sat down and were like, ‘All right, I’ll take lead on him, you take lead on the business, and we’ll do as much as we can to help each other out.’”

Today, 1-year-old Marsden is just a bit more independent, already on his feet and wasting no time in exploring the huge space around him. “We joke that he’s our mascot,” says Katie. “He comes whenever I come to work out or if I’m doing work here. We’ll be teaching him all about gym safety now that he’s mobile.”

One-year-old Marsden Neufeld

Fitting in Family

For the Neufelds, exploring nature as a family helps keep them grounded amid the uncertainty. “We like to take Sundays as our community day. There are so many things about Florida that I didn’t get to see as a child,” says Katie. “Florida has a lot of really awesome outdoor areas to explore. So it’s important to us that he experiences that.”

Among their favorite Florida features are the local springs, like Kelly Park and Wekiva Springs. “Marsden loves the water and doesn’t care that it’s cold because he’s crazy,” Katie says. “We just like to get outside and do things as a family.”

“We’re very outdoorsy. Even before we had him, we went on vacations to get out there and experience new cultures,” she says. “Now that we’ve had him and we have the business, we can’t really travel as much, so we’re like, ‘OK, what can we do that’s around here?’ So we just experience Florida more. Selfishly, I want him to like it, to grow up with health and fitness as part of this nature.”

With building the new business and keeping up with a growing toddler, making time for everything can be a challenge. The Neufelds are doing their best to balance it all while introducing their young son to the things that mean the most to them. “

This past year is probably the hardest of either of our lives,” says Jeremy. “You realize that stress is a real thing, trying to make a business thrive, and things we had our hearts set on—oh, this is gonna be our bread and butter, we can both do this together—we’re still not there. It’s still a slugfest. But you just make do with what you have, stick to your guns, and know it’s all going to turn around.”