Jeisla Chaves went from holding cards during fights to being the one in the cage trading punches and kicks. Saturday night she makes her UFC debut.<\/p>\n
The 29-year-old Chaves grew up in Po\u00e7oes, a small town in Bahia, Brazil, and went to school dreaming of one day making a living as a geography teacher. Years went by. She graduated in the area and found a 9-to-5 job. One day, an old school friend reached out asking she if was interested in making some money as a ring girl for a Muay Thai event organized by his coach.<\/p>\n
Chaves said yes and opened a door to a new world.<\/p>\n
\u201cI traded ring cards for gloves and that\u2019s when everything changed in my life,\u201d Chaves told MMA Fighting ahead of her UFC Vegas 118 flyweight clash with Yuneisy Duben.<\/p>\n
Shortly after her start as a ring girl, Chaves fell in love with Muay Thai.<\/p>\n
\u201cI had been training for only about a month when my coach, who is still my coach today and runs the promotion where I worked as a ring girl, told me, \u2018Next year, you\u2019ll be with me at the event,\u2019\u201d Chaves said. \u201cAt first, I thought he meant as a ring girl again. I said, \u2018Okay, I\u2019ll be there with you again. I\u2019m glad you liked my work.\u2019 He replied, \u2018No, you\u2019ll be there as my fighter.\u2019 In less than a year, I had my first amateur Muay Thai fight at that event and became champion. That was the moment everything changed. I loved it. I knew that was what I wanted for my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chaves kept working on her Muay Thai skills before joining jiu-jitsu classes to look at a potential transition to MMA, which eventually happened in 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cI worked at events in my hometown and in the area, so some people where I\u2019m from know me both as a ring girl and as a fighter,\u201d Chaves said. \u201cI started training professionally and gave up a lot of things. I quit my job and even had conflicts with my family. It\u2019s not like my mom was against it, but she didn\u2019t support it either because she would see me coming home injured and I was the only girl training at the gym.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chaves worked at a shoe factory at the time and passed on a promotion because that would mean moving to a different city and leaving the gym. She also declined a job offer to teach geography at a local school. Chaves never told her mother about those opportunities, but it all turned out for the better in the end as she\u2019s now moments away from making the walk to the octagon as a UFC fighter.<\/p>\n
This past September, Chaves earned a contract with the UFC after a three-round bloody war with Sofia Montenegro on Dana White\u2019s Contender Series, a match Chaves won by split decision. UFC signed both athletes, and Chaves feels better prepared now that she will have her original coaches with her in Las Vegas after their visas were denied in 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat showed me that I\u2019m stronger than I ever imagined,\u201d Chaves said of her experience on DWCS. \u201cI think that fight, if it had happened in the UFC, definitely would have earned us a [Fight of the Night] bonus. It was an amazing fight, exactly the way I like it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Chaves expects the same now for her UFC debut against Duben, a Venezuelan athlete who, like Chavez, was 6-0 going into her first bout under the UFC banner before she lost to Carli Judice by first-round knockout.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it\u2019s going to be the kind of fight I love,\u201d Chaves said. \u201cA lot of action, a lot of exchanges and blood, and hopefully something similar to what happened on the Contender Series. I think that\u2019s where the nickname \u2018A Braba\u2019 [Badass, in Portuguese] came from. I was always moving forward and trading punches with the men at<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jeisla Chaves went from holding cards during fights to being the one in the cage trading punches and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":715187,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,85,787,1396],"class_list":["post-715186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715186\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/715187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}