Homeless No Longer!

8 Aug 2010

Posted by Utah Martial Arts Feeds

This Article comes from Arcanum Brazilian Jiu-jitsu Blog
To see the full original article click here

Last month I was a man on a mission, driven by one motive: Find a new place to train.

That mission has paid off. Starting August 11, Team Machado Utah (TMU) will be taking up residency at East West MMA in South Jordan.

I’m completely stoked about this for three reasons:

East West is about 12 minutes from my house and 3 minutes from my work – a huge time saver.
I won’t have to leave my coach and join another school.
I was the one who scouted out East West as a possible location for our team.

My coach had several of options for the team, but he said if I found a good place in the south valley he’d consider it, no guarantees. That’s all I needed. I was so keen to train again, I spent several days combing the South Jordan / Riverton area for fitness centers, martial arts schools, even gymnastics centers…anything that had floor space to host a BJJ program.

The least likely place I went was a local indoor rock climbing gym called Momentum (which is totally sweet, by the way). I thought we could train in their yoga studio. How cool would that be? Rock climbing in the morning, BJJ in the evening? Sounded like a pretty sweet setup to me.

I eventually found East West MMA by Googling “South Jordan Martial Arts.” The website was honestly a little questionable – in my opinion a bit hokey – but it said they teach BJJ there. I read a good review at the <a href="http://www.utahmartialart.com/2009/07/training-at-east-west-mma/" Utah Martial Art blog (although I think the location was different in the review). The school is located in a new business cluster very close to where I work, so at lunch I went and visited with Bryce, the owner.

I was pleased to find that Bryce trains in BJJ and that he had a very reputable BJJ black belt teaching there. A great start.

He liked the idea of adding the team to East West, so I put him on contact with Dave. Apparently Dave liked the idea, too.. enough to choose it out of several other options in the area.

Here’s hoping it will be a good fit. There is already a no-gi program there, and Dave emphasizes gi training. It will be an interesting experience to see how the dynamics of merging a new team in with an existing school work out. Hopefully we have a bunch of cool guys that will be excited to learn from each other and expand their training platform.

All in all, I’m glad to be able to stay with my current coach. I did go check out some other schools just in case, and I can’t say enough about the quality of BJJ programs available in the Salt Lake valley. I had a great impression of two schools in particular: Absolute MMA and Unified BJJ. Really excellent schools. But the truth is I didn’t want to leave my team and coach if at all possible. I feel like I have a solid foundation and could do well at another place, but I really enjoy Dave’s coaching style and have some good friends on the team. There’s no reason for me to change.

I’ll keep you posted about my experiences in moving to a new academy. In the mean time, it’s good to have a home.

Post tags:

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

To comment on this post, please visit the original article click here