After more than a decade of trying, Shannon Schafer and her husband, Jonathan, are finally going to see their dream come true — a new sports center that’s more than four times bigger than their current building.
Within the next few months, the Schafers will move their business, the Schafer School of Gymnastics, from its current 8,500-square-foot studio in Lawrence to their brand-new 37,800 square foot facility on Graphics Drive in Ewing Township. The new studio is being rebranded as the Schafer Sports Center.
As the name change implies, the school will have more than gymnastics. The new facility boasts a 9,300-square-foot-column-free open gymnasium, a 5,200-square-foot swimming area — that includes a 4-foot deep teaching pool filled with 90-degree warm water — and a 13,400-square-foot indoor Astroturf field for soccer, lacrosse and field hockey. Rounding out the new facility are party rooms, a fitness center and a dance room.
Shannon said she is most excited, though, about facilities in the new building — including a dedicated room — for her to work with athletes with disabilities. The Schafers are big supporter of Special Olympics and the school is a partner with the organization.
“My mind is filled with all the great things I will be able to do for my athletes,” Shannon said, adding that the plan is to turn the special needs facility into a mini version of Children’s Specialized Hospital, national chain that provides inpatient and outpatient care for children facing special health challenges.
Shannon said she is hoping to offer speech therapy, occupational therapy, ABA therapy (Applied Behavior for people with Autism) and social skills classes.
“We have to teach our children how to say hello to someone, how to look at someone,” Shannon said. “A lot of times they want to be by themselves. A child with special needs is more challenged processing things. They get frustrated.”
“Imagine you can’t verbalize,” she said. “The frustration is still going to come out.” Each child handles their frustration differently. She said she works hard with the kids and their parents to figure out what each one needs. “It takes a lot of work and a lot of patience.”
Shannon said she sets the bar high for the kids. “I am working towards transitioning my athletes. At least they have a place where they can participate and their parents can see them participating. For a parent to see they now have the ability to be a part of things speaks volumes. It’s gratifying when a mother is sitting there in tears because she is so happy her child is doing an activity that someone else said he or she could not do. I am so blessed. I wish I could do it on a larger scale.”
Shannon added that she would like to travel to gymnastics schools throughout the state in order to train them how to handle special needs athletes. “There is so much fear from gym owners,” she said, adding that many gyms make excuses for why they cannot work with a child with special needs, such as insurance restrictions, for example.
“My thing is recognize you don’t know how to do it. Recognize this is a population who needs it. Then figure out how to do it,” she said.
Shannon discovered her passion for working with special needs athletes about 15 years ago, not long after she met Jonathan and started teaching gymnastics at the school.
“A parent had a child on the (autistic) spectrum,” she said. “It was my first experience with a child who had autism as it related to the gym, and I wasn’t sure I could do it. The mother had been told that her son would never talk, run and jump, and she wanted him to be part of an activity. I didn’t know how it would work, but I decided I would give it a good try.”
Shannon said she worked to develop a process that involves breaking each activity down into tiny steps, piece by piece in order to teach activities to the child.
“From that point on I knew what I wanted to do,” she said. “The mom saw the transformation and came in smiling with tears of joy. It is something I want to see for the parents of special needs and for the kids. They understand what we are saying. They feel they can’t verbalize and get it out so we have to figure out how to get in and recognize they are in there and have to work a little differently to get it out. After that I started working with other children.”
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The journey to get the new school constructed has not been a smooth one. Jonathan opened Schafer Gymnastics in 1988, nine years before he met Shannon, and the couple bought the land in Ewing for the new school in 2005.
“We thought it would be easy,” Shannon said, “but the market crashed shortly after and no banks were giving out loans. It was quite stressful. We thought we would be in a place by now and possibly even expanding.”
Shannon said she credit’s her husband for his determination for getting the project approved. “He pounded the pavement on this and kept the belief it was going to happen and a bank would say yes. He never wavered.”
After going through more than 40 lenders, Jonathan’s faith in the process finally yielded a positive response from American Heritage Federal Credit Union in 2014. The project was approved by the township a short time later.
Shannon said that Jonathan is the gymnast in the family — he was a specialist on the still rings. She adds that he still has the build of a ring specialist – strong, with wide shoulders tapering to a smaller lower body.
Jonathan was in the 11th grade he decided to start gymnastics, which is pretty late for someone to start training in the sport. In 10th grade, he had lived in a kibbutz in Israel, and his roommate started each day with a series of pushups and sit ups.
He asked him how he got to that point, and the roommate responded that he started with one and added one (repetition) every day. Jonathan decided to do the same. He changed his eating habits, lost weight and started doing gymnastics.
“His first coach told him he wasn’t the most talented, but he was the hardest worker,” Shannon said. “He loved how driven Jon was and that’s why he made the gymnastics team.”
Jonathan attended the University of Delaware for two years to study biology and was on the school’s gymnastics team before transferring to Temple University. In his fourth year, he switched to a dance major and took additional two years to graduate.
“Jon was intrigued by movement,” Shannon said, and he also studied dance to help helped him with his gymnastics. He even had a brief stint as a dancer in “Fiddler on the Roof” in Philadelphia, but quickly realized he wouldn’t be able to make a career as a dancer. He then became a gymnastics coach, working in a number of places. He eventually realized that in order to coach the way he wanted to, he would have to open his own studio, which he did in 1988.
Shannon, meanwhile, had began working in the sports after first trying a career in the corporate world.
She had grown up in South Carolina and graduated from South Carolina State University, but knew that she didn’t want to stay in the state. Growing up, she had spent time during summer vacations with her grandmother, who lived in New Jersey, and decided to move to the state.
After moving here, she got a job in at big company, and to unwind from the stress volunteered at a hospital in Jersey City cuddling HIV and AIDS infected babies.
She eventually decided corporate life was not for her, and became a fitness trainer and aerobics instructor, working at five different gyms to make ends meet. It was the 1990s, during the age of intensive aerobics workouts, and Shannon She taught five to six classes every day, in addition to taking on private clients, and doing her own work outs.
This led her to a stint teaching Hip Hop at Gold’s Gym in Princeton, where she met Jonathan in 1997. She was 29 years old, and Jon was 13 years her senior.
They had seen each other working out in the gym before, and one day when Shannon was done with the class, he came up and spoke to her.
She said she was skeptical when she first met him — after all he was in his 40s and never married, but “that lasted about a minute. He was so sweet. Sixteen years later here we are.”
“Here” is married with two kids: Logan, 14, and Landon, 10. The couple now lives in Pennington, but they lived for a number of years in Lawrence Township.
“My little one is on our boys’ team here,” she said. “He has been doing gymnastics since he was five, but really since he was in the womb. He has to run, flip, jump, skip. My oldest one has zero interest in gymnastics. It doesn’t come easily for him. He likes basketball and uses the space [at the gym] with friends for flag football and flips [Jon taught him how to flip].”
Juggling two active children, their schedules, and a thriving business is a challenge. Jonathan watches the kids on Monday and Wednesday nights, while Schafer is teaching. They also have college students who are their former gymnastic students helping out. Both boys recognize “the new place is for the entire Schafer family to be working – especially the first year or two,” Shannon said. “It is really quite a juggling act.”
A large part of the Schafer team is their manager, Allison Ryan, a self-described “morning person,” who has been at the gym for 22 years.
“There were no teaching jobs at the time [when she graduated from college] so I started here as a temporary position,” said Ryan, who has a degree in health and physical education. ” I love it. I can’t imagine being anywhere else. I develop the little kids.”
Ryan’s position will soon increase to include scheduling all of the programs in the new location. All of the school’s summer camp programs, for example, will include time in the pool, time which has to be carefully arranged.
Schafer Gymnastics, 1880 Princeton Ave., Lawrence Township. New location: 5 Graphics Drive, Ewing. Phone: (609) 393-5855. On the web: schafergymnastics.com.
The groundbreaking of the Schafer Sports Center.,
