Oceanside parents looking to burn off some after-school energy have a new address for it. Rookies Kids Fitness & Athletics, the Bellmore gym built entirely around children, opened its second location at 3648 Long Beach Road on September 14, and classes are already running seven days a week.

A gym where the members are three feet tall

Rookies is not a kids corner inside an adult gym. The whole facility is designed for children, with group classes that run from toddlers who have just started walking up through 14-year-olds. The youngest set gets a movement exploration program for kids two and under, built around climbing, balancing and the general business of learning what a body can do. From there, youth fitness and sports classes carry kids from age three through middle school, layering in coordination, strength and the beginnings of real athletic training.

The pitch, in the company's own framing, is that the workout should feel like recess. Classes fold fitness into games, obstacle courses and sports drills, so a kid who spends 45 minutes working hard walks out having mostly registered the fun. Coaches work sportsmanship, teamwork and a little leadership into the mix along the way, and the programming is built to be modified for children of different abilities, so a class can hold kids at very different starting points.

From one Merrick Road storefront to two towns

The original Rookies sits at 2477 Merrick Road in Bellmore, where founders Marc and Meghan Dern built the concept into a neighborhood fixture with a full slate of classes, birthday parties, school-break camps and Kids Night Out events, the last of which is exactly what it sounds like for the parents involved: a few quiet hours.

The expansion has been in motion all summer. Rookies announced in late June that a second location was coming, published the Oceanside class schedule and opening promotion in late July, and announced a grand opening party in early August. The doors opened on September 14.

The new gym serves more than its own zip code. Rookies is positioning the Long Beach Road facility as the home base for families across the southwest corner of Nassau, naming Oceanside, Rockville Centre, East Rockaway, Long Beach, Baldwin Harbor and Merrick as its catchment. Hours run through the week, with mornings on weekends, evenings on weekdays and a Friday afternoon block.

Why Oceanside

Oceanside is a sports town with a deep bench of youth leagues, and it has been on a run of new arrivals lately: a Häagen-Dazs at the Sands Shopping Center over the summer, tacos and margaritas at the old Me'Lore corner this week, and a Whole Foods on the way into the shuttered Amazon Fresh. A dedicated kids fitness facility on Long Beach Road slots neatly into that stretch, and it fills a niche the big-box gyms in the area do not, since a standard gym membership starts at an age most Rookies members will not reach for a decade.

Beyond the weekly classes, the Oceanside location will offer the same extras as Bellmore: personal training and private classes for kids who want more focused work, birthday parties on the turf, and camps and clinics during school breaks. There are adult fitness classes on the schedule too, so the drop-off crowd has an option that does not involve sitting in the car.

What it means for parents here

The practical news is simple: if you live in Oceanside or the towns around it, there is now a gym where a 15-month-old, a 7-year-old and a 13-year-old can each have a class built for them, five minutes from the middle of town. Fall enrollment is open, the schedule is posted, and the first classes have already met. For a corner of Nassau that takes its youth sports seriously, another option for keeping kids moving through the winter is the kind of opening that gets a group chat going.