The Gentle Art Challenge

February 24, 2020

By Aaron Martinez

Last Saturday our competition team participated in the Gentle Art Challenge, which is the Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournament held at the Evo fitness Expo in Sacramento. The expo was packed with other types of fitness competitions: Boxing, Pro Wrestling, Olympic Lifting, Power Lifting, Karate, Taekwondo, Skate Boarding, archery, and many others. It’s a great atmosphere of energetic competitiveness, but also a great respect between the different sports and fitness styles as competitors became spectators before and after their performances.

Our kid’s team came out huge with 9 competitors, which was nearly half of the total Kids competitors for the entire tournament. A few of our kids had actual brackets with competitors from other schools, but most of our team had to compete under Consolation matches. Consolation matches are simply matches for the fun and experience of it, rather than winning divisions and medals.

We also had two of our Purple Belt coaches compete in the NoGi submission only divisions. Coach Bobby had an aggressive and offensive match for 7 minutes, but lost in the overtime by not escaping the back control as fast as his opponent did.

Coach Jamie had two beautiful submissions in her two matches. She won the first by a guillotine choke and the second with a heal hook for a Gold Medal in her division.

It was a wonderful day with the team. The tournament had the feeling of an in-house tournament with so many of our kids and families in attendance. There was plenty of space and activities for the team to spend some quality time with each other, and really bond over a fun day of competing.

Hopefully we can make this an annual tradition.

(Coach Bobby teaches our woman’s self-defense program on Wednesdays & Fridays at 9AM, and Coach Jamie teaches our Tuesday & Thursday All-Levels classes at 3:30pm)