Fighting the good fight
Jody Sheeley found a second chance. Now he’s paying it forward.
The road to 2nd Chance Gym is a thousand-foot driveway at 149 Krug Road, one that starts with “GYM” scrawled on a makeshift board for a sign and ends at a post and beam barn.
But for boxing instructor Jody Sheeley, the metaphorical road to this gym involves 25 years of sobriety, a divorce and remarriage, and a weariness with snow removal.
On Monday, Feb. 17, after a weekend of open houses and visits from old friends, Sheeley opened the second iteration of 2nd Chance Gym in the barn at his Preston home.
The original 2nd Chance Gym — which wasn’t run as a business as Sheeley didn’t charge kids — operated in the garage of his former home in Norwich from 2003 to 2006.
In the new space, on one side of the boxing ring and six punching bags, a wall is lined with old newspapers from The Day, The Bulletin, The Sun and The Hartford Courant. They tell stories not only of Sheeley, but also of Rollie Pier, Sammy Vega, Johnny Duke, Felix Nance and John DeCastro.
“I call this my Connecticut tribute wall,” Sheeley said, having noted that it’s the kind of wall where you’d see Tyrone Booze, not Mike Tyson.
Opposite that wall, the women’s and men’s locker rooms bear messages meant to inspire the kids who come to the gym: “Giving up on a goal because of a setback is like slashing your other 3 tires” and “You cannot hang out with negative people and expect to live a positive life.”
In between the locker rooms are pictures of people Sheeley has trained in the past, and as he talks about his middle child, he gets choked up. This is not uncommon for Sheeley, 53, who describes himself as someone who wears his heart on his sleeve.
Chase Sheeley, 22, said he got into boxing about six years ago, when he was overweight. He had trouble bonding with his dad, “just being a teenager,” but mutual respect for the sport brought them together.
“He pushes me, but he knows my limits, and he knows when I’m able to give more and when I’m out of it,” he said.
Chase recently competed in the Western New England Golden Gloves tournament, and he’s now fighting with UConn, where he’s studying materials science and engineering as a grad student. He tries to make
it to his father’s gym a few days a week.
One thing Jody Sheeley said he hasn’t gotten yet is the musty smell of a boxing gym. But he relishes in the sounds, between “the thunder of the bags, the crack of the gloves ... the speed bag rat-tat-tatting.”
Sheeley started boxing at 15, fighting in the same Norwich gym as John DeCastro and Felix Nance. DeCastro ocassionally volunteers as a coach at 2nd Chance Gym.
Sheeley began working as a Norwich firefighter in 1985, at 19, and retired in 2007. For nearly the first decade, when he wasn’t at work, he was drinking.
“I was a square in a round hole kind of kid, and that’s probably one of the reasons I went down the road I did,” Sheeley said. He had started drinking around 14 and started doing a lot of cocaine in the year prior to getting sober in 1994.
He got a second chance, and he wanted kids to get theirs.
Sheeley opened his first gym out of his Norwich home but closed it because he was getting divorced and moved out. For the past few years, he coached at Strike Zone MMA.
His work as a firefighter and coaching kids in boxing on the side also overlapped with running Lawn Care Etc., a landscaping company he grew from two employees to six. But as winter approached last year, he was tired of handling snow after 18 years.
With the encouragement of his wife, Michelle Jacobik, he decided to reopen 2nd Chance Gym. Jacobik previously coowned Sava Insurance, so she knows a thing or two about running a business.
The couple originally planned to sell their 10-acre property in Preston and buy a small house in Mystic, but that would’ve meant spending money on rent to reopen 2nd Chance Gym.
So, in the barn that previously housed the trucks and excavators for Lawn Care Etc., Sheeley added lighting, radiant heat in the floor, a septic system, an emergency fire exit and smoke detectors.
And through everything — through the difficult times in his youth, and through a firefighting accident and car accident that collectively left him feeling like “the Tin Man in the morning” — Sheeley remains positive.
“There’s a silver lining in everything that’s happened in my life that’s maybe not been good,” Sheeley said.