Members of the Weyburn MMA Club brought home medals from the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu\u00a0Submission Wrestling No Gi Tournament, held on Saturday in Moose Jaw.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Nikolas Nikulin,\u00a0Emmett Rogers,\u00a0Harley Frederickson, and\u00a0Ava Chapman each earned gold medals, and\u00a0Valeria Chorna earned a silver medal.\u00a0Atlas Frederickson also competed but did not make it to the podium.<\/p>\n
Head Instructor Dean Hodgkin said their club focuses on Jiu-Jitsu, kickboxing, and wrestling. While they can and do sometimes wear a Gi, the competitions don’t involve katas or patterns.<\/p>\n
“It’s more so time on the mat, and then showing that you are able to perform the techniques. Of course, sparring, or what we call in the Jiu-Jitsu world, rolling is a big aspect of it. Kind of similar to wrestling, when you start on your feet and you’re trying to jockey for a dominant position, takedowns, top position and then ultimately getting a submission would win the match,” he explained. “But similar to wrestling, you’re looking to score points and that’s the content of a tournament. If you go through your five-minute rounds and you’re up on points, you’re the winner. If you manage to perform a submission on your opponent and forcing them to tap or quit, then you win the match.”<\/p>\n
Hodgkin said wrestling and Jiu-Jitsu are complementary in that one helps improve skill in the other. The club also offers a wrestling class for kids on Sundays.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“It’s excellent because it prepares the students for the tournaments like these,” he shared. “All of the coaches are very proud of the students that competed, because it’s not an easy feat. Only a small part of this club actually competes in these tournaments because they are quite challenging.\u00a0We recommend usually at least a semester or even a full year of training before we allow students in these tournaments.\u00a0They compete in their appropriate brackets according to their belts, age, and weight category.”<\/p>\n
He shared that the medals won at this tournament were actually metal.<\/p>\n
“We used to get small, two-inch plastic medals. Now they’re heavy metal medals. I let the kids bring them to class and they can show them off to all the other kids, too.”<\/p>\n
Following Saturday’s tournament, some of the club members met on Sunday with leadership from Regina, who brought honours, including a Brown Belt for Weyburn’s Sheldon LeBlanc, and a Blue Belt for\u00a0Owen Altwasser of Yellow Grass.<\/p>\n
Hodgkin can now be called ‘Professor’ after receiving his Black Belt in Brazillian Jui-Jitsu, the first in Weyburn to do so.<\/p>\n
“They come in they teach a bunch of moves and then afterwards we do some sparring and I was surprised with with a Black Belt from Professor Mike Lee from Regina Northwest Academy of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. [It was a] big surprise to me, I wasn’t expecting it, but a huge honour nonetheless.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“I’ve been in the sport for 15 years. I knew it was coming eventually, I just didn’t expect it this weekend, in my hometown, in the club that we built for so many years. So it was a pleasant surprise.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Hodgkin said Jiu-Jitsu has a\u00a0tough grading system, and having taken longer than the typical 10 years to earn his Black Belt all comes down to location.<\/p>\n
“We don’t train all the time in the summer, and being that there were no black belts in Weyburn, we were having to go to Regina for coaching, so it took a little longer than most, but happy to get it.”<\/p>\n
He said the Weyburn MMA Club doesn’t teach strictly\u00a0mixed martial arts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We do kickboxing for kids and Jiu-Jitsu for kids and then Jiu-Jitsu for adults, and then we do actually have one of our coaches teaching an all-women’s mixed kickboxing Jiu-Jitsu class,” he said. “We’re always looking for more programs to start, more classes to fill, but right now we’re limited for coaches. So we’ve actually had to cancel our adult kickboxing class a couple years back, because we’re short on coaches, which is unfortunate because it was a pretty popular class. So in the future we can open up some more spots.”<\/p>\n
Kids classes are capped due to the coaching shortage, and they are not currently accepting registration.<\/p>\n
“There is certainly waiting list until spots open up. We have two separate age brackets, 5 to 9 and 9 to 14. But certainly there’s lots of room for adults, usually two days a week, Mondays and Wednesdays at 7:30 for the adults, and then there is usually open mat training on the weekend as well.”<\/p>\n
While the kids programs run from September to May, the club has open mat training throughout summer for adults. Anyone who wants to learn more about joining can find an FAQ<\/a> on the Weyburn MMA Club Facebook<\/a> page.<\/p>\n Hodgkin said they are a not-for-profit and don’t have a website, but emailing the club at weyburnmmaclub@gmail.com also works for having questions answered.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n “We’re not so much set up like a business, we’re kind of like a family. We’ve got a great group right now, there’s no doubt. It’s something about combat sports, they humble you quite quickly, so anybody with any kind of attitude either adjusts it quite quickly coming in, or just doesn’t stick around, so it creates a really good environment.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n He added that his biggest takeaway from his promotion to Black Belt is bringing it back to the club and representing the club.<\/p>\n “It sure looks good to have a Jiu-Jitsu Black Belt within your club, it legitimatizes everything more, even though we’ve been around forever.”\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Members of the Weyburn MMA Club brought home medals from the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu\u00a0Submission Wrestling No Gi Tournament, held…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":198627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,638,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-198626","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-mma","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=198626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/198626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=198626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=198626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=198626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}