This Saturday, Jubera Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu competed in the Grappling Industries Tournament and out of 70+ teams represented we came away with second place as a team! We were leading after the Gi divisions, but only had a couple competitors in No-Gi. I am super pumped about the results and showed the hard work that the competitors put in the last handful of weekends in the competition class.
Things that went very well
I thought our takedowns looked the best they ever have. With our competitors of both kids and adults showing off double and single legs along with sprawls and collar drags. We revamped our kids takedown system at the start of the year and then made some tweaks to that curriculum a few months ago and the results have been astounding. We also made some changes to our wrestling setups with the gi and it as killer.
Also our transition from the closed guard to the open guard was a big thing that got fixed up. Our guard openings improved a lot at the last tournament, but that even though our passing is a major strength of the team it was the transition between opening the closed guard and passing that was missing a bit. We focused on pulling up and crunching our opponent after the guard gets opened and that helped a ton. The change in success rate was dramatic.
Armbars for kids. We have changed the way we presented the armbar from mount to make it more accessible for kids and it has gone gangbusters. Plus just a focus on mount over side control this year has gone a long way to simplify what we are teaching the kids and how fast we can get them training well. This is in big thanks to my friends at other academies that I collaborate with.
Mount escapes. Not every match is going to go perfect and while I feel like our side control escapes have looked great for the past year, our mount escapes I felt were lacking. This kills me because most students find it easier to escape the mount than side control and it is so similar to side control. We changed how we were presenting the concepts (fighting for inside space for the upper body, then the lower body, then beating the feet) and it went great.
Mental toughness and competition preparedness. The competitors kept coming up and saying how well prepared they felt physically and mentally. There were some tough saturday competition practices along with going over the mental prep for competition.
Things to work on
Again, I couldn’t be more proud of the students and how they did, their wins are a win for everyone at the academy and reflect how good of a room we have day in and day out.
Resets. When you go out of bounds in a tournament and reset it is up to the competitors to make sure they reset in a fair position. The refs won’t fix a bad reset position so it is up to the competitor to be assertive about where their body was in relation to their opponents. So if you are too passive about it you can really get hurt on a reset which happened a few times.
Hail Mary Submissions. A few times our guys were dominating and got caught in an baseball choke or anklelock. It is one of things that are easy to defend and we go over these submissions a lot in advanced classes, but more as when we are winning (ie. a baseball choke from knee on belly rather than vs a pass) or anklelock from x-guard rather than the top playing going for one because they can’t pass the guard. The reason for this is that isn’t a great strategy long term and I don’t want my students getting in bad habits. But you have to expect desperate submissions from opponents who are losing, they won’t go down quietly.
Parent/Professor Conferences. We will add just a few minute conference between our coaches and parents to make sure they are a bit more comfortable with the process and how to help their kids out mentally in preparation for the tournament.