Newtown Athletic Club owner has the knack for SUCCESS IN THE COMPETITIVE HEALTH & FITNESS INDUSTRY
NEWTOWN – For Jim Worthington, it’s all about vision. The long-time owner of the Newtown Athletic Club (NAC), Worthington keeps his eye on the ball, the prize and the big picture. Avoiding clichés would likely be his only failure since taking over the club in the early 80s.
In 19T8, Worthington took a job at what was then the Newtown Racquet Club and started thinking. The club’s focus on racquetball lasted about as long as Worthington’s time not in charge. In 1981, he became manager and kept thinking. In 1983, he became partner, stopped thinking and started doing.
nuickly but somewhat methodically, Worthington started removing racquetball courts in favor of workout rooms. The philosophy was remarkably simple.
“I had all this square footage, and two people were using it to play racquetball,” Worthington remembered. “The key was, take that square footage and get 10 to 15 people working out in that space. You have to maximize your square footage to make money.”
Shifting the focus from racquetball to aerobic exercise represented the first of several major changes that has allowed Worthington and the NAC to keep up with – and in some cases be ahead of – the workout curve. The validity of that statement, Worthington said, can be seen by taking a quick look at where fitness has gone since Worthington took over NAC.
“There hasn’t been an indoor tennis facility in the Philadelphia area in more than 30 years,” Worthington said. “That’s too much square footage for just two or four people to use.”
When he came aboard, the NAC sat on a 3-acre plot of land. Almost 20 acres later, Club Industry – a publication and website focused on the “fitness business professionals” the workout facility is the country’s third largest single-site workout facility in the country (national chains don’t count), with 80,0000 outdoor square feet – there’s that unit of measurement again – after the addition of the pools.
Ah, yes … the pools. Most workout clubs have pools. Not many have a sprawling, four-pool area with water park-type slides. It furthers the image Worthington has for his club. Because, to its owner, the NAC isn’t just an athletic club, despite its name.
“We’re a lifestyle choice,” Worthington said. “We’re not just a place to exercise. We call ourselves a country club without the golf course.”
The new pool area was part of an $8.5 million expansion, which also included 41,000 new square feet of workout space. Most would think that a facility of this type wouldn’t be cheap. Most would be right – if they looked at it from face value, not the value of the money they pay. To members, there’s no individual fee to play in the new water park. There’s no a la carte fee for a wumba class or a dance class. It’s all under one roof. Just as Worthington envisioned.
As the NAC continued to grow and as the calendar flipped to the 90s, Worthington had another vision.
“I saw that the industry was going to ma-
ture, despite the fact that people weren’t ready for this type of facility,” Worthington said. Indeed, most moms and dads were running sons to karate and dropping daughters off at dance and hoping to squeeze in 30 minutes of a workout – barely enough time to elicit a real sweat. It was time to target his next audience – kids.
“In the mid-90s we made a huge commitment to children’s programming,” Worthington said. “Other places had this and that for kids, but nobody else had committed a full facility to children’s programming.” The commitment was tangible – 30,000 square feet (of course) of space dedicated to the younger generation. While the children don’t pay the bills, to an extent they control the ones who do.
“If you lock in the kids, parents can’t leave,” Worthington said with a laugh. “The kids don’t want to leave, so the parents stay and work out. The parents aren’t going to give up their membership if their kids are using it. It’s the key to NAC.”
Again, it was everything under one roof. While joking about locking the children in so the parents couldn’t leave, Worthington wants to offer as much as he can so there’s no reason to leave. And since it’s all included in the price of a membership, Worthington figures parents won’t want to cut another check for something they can get at a place they’re already playing for. Expense versus value. Value appears to be winning by a landslide.
With 12,000 members, a bulletin board might not be the most efficient way to communicate what’s going around the NAC. To that end, Linda Mitchell has taken care of the club’s pub for the better part of Worthington’s tenure. You don’t undergo the growth NAC has without help, as Worthington noted several times.
Nothing is guaranteed, including the future success of the NAC. Despite that, Worthington remains confident that his club will remain unique, especially in the area. He credits his current success to the methodical pace with which he’s grown his business. It’s not realistic to think that somebody could just plop an athletic center on 20-plus acres in one, expensive swoop.
“We really don’t have any competition,” Worthington said. “Really, our only competition is ourselves, trying to do the best job we can.”
He said that he always had a vision of a “large campus” with “all kinds of different activities for families.” It seems as if he was seeing the future.
“I wasn’t always sure exactly what it would look like, but I think this is pretty close,” Worthington said.