Ep. 339: Developing Youth Programs, feat. Brennan Strimple

Speaker 1: Hey everybody, before we get started this week, I have huge news. She actually did it. We're pleased to announce that Beatrice Jin, top-ranked women's competitor in North America and long-time BJJ Mental Models premium community member, has published her first ever course with us, exclusive to BJJ Mental Models. It's called Stop Being Nice. It's a three-part audio series designed to solve real mindset problems that regular folks experience in jiu-jitsu. If you struggle to be aggressive and competitive in jiu-jitsu, you'll find the solutions here. If you're already a BJJ Mental Models premium subscriber, you've already got access. And if you are not, good news, you can get it now and get your first week free. Go to bjjmentalmodels.com and check it out today. Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to BJJ Mental Models episode 339. I'm Steve Kwan. BJJ Mental Models is your guide to a conceptual and intelligent jiu-jitsu approach. And I'm here today with Brendan Strimple from RPMA, Rochester Phoenix Martial Arts. Brendan, my friend, how is it going? Speaker 2: It's going great, Steve. I'm glad to be here. It's a good day. Speaker 1: Happy to have you too. Definitely glad to have you on. Now, you and I have collaborated on some content on the side here, but I thought it would be great to actually get you on the main channel to talk about your gym. The one thing that I have always been impressed by with your culture is just the the diligence and the emphasis that you guys at RPMA put on kids programs. We've got long-time friends in our community like George Curran, who has been a long-time BJJ Mental Models premium member, and we've been going back and forth. Through him, I got to know you and I got to learn more about the culture of the gym that you're building. And I'd love to maybe expand on that in this week's episode, but I'll turn it over to you. Why don't you introduce yourself, the gym, and ultimately what you guys are looking to achieve at RPMA that might be a bit different from other gyms? Speaker 2: We founded in 2014, my wife and myself founded the school, and, you know, we originally were a karate school and we had jiu-jitsu kind of uh on the side. We had hired a black belt instructor, a long-time friend. And so he was running the program. And so we kind of started a kids jiu-jitsu class on the side, and we learned, you know, through trial and error that kids were learning jiu-jitsu significantly faster than they were karate. They were learning to handle themselves more peacefully, but also like better. Like it would take kids, you know, at least three years of training before they could be able to to stand up to a bully using traditional like punching and kicking, you know, karate or Taekwondo style methods. But with jiu-jitsu, they were they were wrestling around and they were holding their own within a few weeks of training. You know, so we we quickly switched over to that to jiu-jitsu being our main program for kids. And, you know, we slowly got into competitions, you know, we were we were more thinking we'd be self-defense first and, you know, so we kind of went in some phases. But within the last year or so, we've really started to get into a lot more competitions for kids, and we really liked the results we were seeing. And so that posed some other questions that uh we want to get into today. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. So I'd love to talk about this. You mentioned that there's kind of a different experience there with kids in jiu-jitsu versus karate. And kids in general are always kind of a little bit different to train from adults. What's been your experience and what have you found in focusing on kids programs and how has that kind of impacted the culture of your gym? Speaker 2: So one, kids are kids are so much more tough. Like they're you can put them into the old school method of jiu-jitsu, like, oh, you got to you got to roll hard and first day you start rolling and except we found with adults, like, you break them and if you get 10 people in the door, maybe one will stick around long-term. And yeah, that one person is going to be an absolute beast on the mats. And that worked for many years, you know, because jiu-jitsu was popular and you were getting a ton of people in. But in a modern world where you're trying to make this a living and you're trying to have a school that, you know, has high rent costs and and overhead and things like that, you kind of can't have one out of 10 sticking around. You know, and so you start to introduce sparring a little bit slower for adults so that those adults will stick around. You know, and and our school, we don't have sparring for adults be mandatory, but we slowly get them into the into it with positional sparring and things like that. We don't restrict it the way other schools do. People will come in and they were, you know, a wrestler or we have a number of rugby guys and they want to roll right away. Sure, like we we get them on the mats. But for the regular, you know, 50-year-old dad, we let them slowly build into rolling. But kids don't have that issue. They get on the mats and they can roll pretty hard their first day without breaking, without that soreness, and that's they really find the enjoyment from that. And assuming they're not with someone that's really outclassing them, they want to come back and they want to roll. And so our hour-long class, we can have half of that be rolling time, which is something that we could never do with adults. They would break. They're way too, you know, because they're older and their muscles and their bones are stronger, but that strength means they're sometimes a bit more fragile until they get used to the grappling. And so since the kids are are able to actually get into the actual randori or live training portion of class sooner, we can really teach them a lot of good jiu-jitsu much quicker than we we could adults. And so because of that, like I've really put a lot of emphasis on training kids and can see them as a a good source of future competitors. Speaker 1: Yeah, that that's actually a great point. Something that many of the kids coaches I know often say is that when you teach your kids, that's also part of your long-term gym strategy because give it 10 years and many of those kids will grow up to be some of your adult customers. Speaker 2: Exactly. Speaker 1: So it's in your best interests to think about them as an investment in the future of your gym. And this is again, you touched on maybe the more traditional issue we see in jiu-jitsu where the attrition rate is just so high because we kind of advertise this is a fight sport and it's for the tough. The end result is, there's a lot of people who probably would have fallen in love with jiu-jitsu and stuck around for the long-term if they hadn't had a terrible experience in the first month and then just quit, right? And I think many gym owners make the mistake of thinking that's a character fault in the customer that, oh, you're just not tough enough to do this sport. I mean, my experience is, I'm not a tough guy and I have no trouble doing jiu-jitsu. Once you get used to it, it ain't so bad. The problem is that a lot of gyms make it unwelcoming to people and they never give them the opportunity to acclimatize and really fall in love with this. And kids are amazing because they're so open to everything. They'll try anything. They aren't as set in their ways as a grown-up is. And like you said, it often seems like they're a lot more resilient as well. They just bounce off the wall sometimes. So I'd love to maybe explore this with you and when you're building a kids program, you know, a common problem I hear with doing this is that it often has dry periods to do with, you know, the school season. In the summer, things tend to just completely dry up and evaporate. That can make it very difficult sometimes for gym owners to build things consistently. Of course, you're not just competing with other jiu-jitsu gyms. With kids, you're competing with other sports, much, much more established sports that the parents might have an emotional investment in. And that can make it a challenge to get them to really commit to jiu-jitsu. I'd love to maybe hear your thoughts on that. How jiu-jitsu kind of stacks up to other sports and how you manage that competition with things like football or basketball or any of those. Speaker 2: For sure. So other sports are are difficult because they draw the kids that are really athletic tend to go to the sports that are going to be sports for them, right? They don't want to come into a class where it's just class after class, year after year, and we go to competitions a year, maybe, right? And sure, you can compete more often, but the price starts to get really, really high. And, you know, we can talk about that in a second. But we've had a number of kids that have come in and you can always tell the kids that are really athletically gifted. And you're like, wow, if this kid stuck with it, you know, they could be a world champion. But they leave for wrestling or baseball or anything that's going to give them that actual sport atmosphere and feeling. And also things that would give them, you know, potential scholarships and things like that for college. So we were kind of thinking like, how can we compete with that? Like, these are legit sports. I mean, and jiu-jitsu definitely is a sport, but it it also has a big culture of it not being a sport and, you know, the self-defense culture and just come to class, like, just enjoy the training and things like that. So there's a lot of internal battle that jiu-jitsu is kind of had to to to go through and grow up with. You know, so we were, you know, recently, we had heard your podcast and we were joining with like the Easton uh group, and we really liked one of the things they said, which was that if you want to compete with school sports, you need to treat this like a sport, especially for the kids. You know, maybe not for adults, you know, they can just have their self-defense class and things like that. I was like, yeah, that that makes total sense to me. I mean, that's what I would prefer to do. I mean, as my son has been training with me on the mats, you know, since he was born. And uh he definitely loves to compete and train treating this like a sport, I think would be better for him, you know, and his growth in in jiu-jitsu. And uh it would be better for to hold kids. And so then we were starting to hold our classes like we were doing sport meets and uh, you know, the practices for that and gearing up for competitions. And we had lined up two a year and we kind of make it a big deal. We go to, you know, to anywhere that's within about an hour drive. After the competition, we stay at a hotel and we get we have like a pizza party by the pool and we we make it a big thing. So whether any of the kids win or lose, you know, we're having a good time and we're celebrating as a team. And that was really good. That was getting a lot of parents and their kids involved and they were wanting to come compete. But the price was still really, really high. Like, you know, tournament registration is at least $100 somewhere around there. And that wasn't something that, you know, me as a school owner could really afford to do. I wanted to have my son competing, you know, like every month, you know, wrestling, you you have meets every single weekend when you're in season. You know, soccer, they have games 12, 15 games in a season. That's a lot of playing. I mean, the cost for that if you were to do jiu-jitsu tournaments would be very high. So my idea was to kind of establish some sort of practice tournament that we could do and get matches going, such that it it wouldn't be cost prohibitive and this could be something that wouldn't just have to be for, you know, the the upper middle class sort of family. Speaker 1: You bring up a really good point. This is something that I've heard from wrestling coaches like you mentioned, which is you look at a sport like that and there are affordable ways for kids in those programs to get a lot of experience. And often those wrestling coaches look at jiu-jitsu and they take a look at the tournament fees that they're expected to pay and the distance they're expected to travel to go to a tournament. And then a lot of these tournaments are single-round elimination, so, you know, you spend a ton of money, you take your kid somewhere way out of town, and then they get maybe one match. It's just really not a great experience. And that is something that I, like you said, I don't think it really lends well to positioning jiu-jitsu as a a sport that people train like a sport. So many of us who are adults, we we're okay with that kind of non-committal, perhaps more expensive competition structure because many people who train, if they do it for fun, you know, two tournaments a year, that might be more than enough for them if they're just doing this as a hobby. However, if you actually want to treat this as a sport, it's ideal if there's some sort of circuit, there's some way to really maximize your training time, especially as a kid, and also to keep the cost down. But that's a tough one because we also want people to make money in the sport. And I'm I'm well aware of how hard it is to organize and run a tournament. I would personally be very loath to do that because I know what it's like. So, how do you guys do that? I mean, what's kind of your vision for how to make those things more accessible, especially to kids? Speaker 2: So I started with one other school. And so the big idea that we had was our our practice tournaments. And we brought, uh his name is Joe, so I I messaged Joe and I was like, hey, like, can we have a practice tournament? You know, we'll we'll just get together. We can do it during kids class time. And um, you know, it'll kind of be your school versus ours. We'll we'll match the kids up best we can for size and weight. And, you know, we'll just we'll run matches. And so we were talking back and forth about the details. And so he got about 10 kids. We got I got about 10 kids. And so our our first two practice tournaments, we held one here and then, you know, about a month later, we went over to his school. And for about two hours, we ran practice matches. As close to a tournament setting as we possibly could. And we kept uh strict rules, so we followed the rules of the tournaments and gave points and, you know, actually ran matches. And the kids were really, really loving it. And they were asking, oh, can we go back there? Like, I want to rematch with, you know, this person because they beat me last time. And so they were actually thinking about, you know, jiu-jitsu and rather than just getting bored from coming to class, they were like, oh, I need to work on my Americana, we'll say, you know, so that I can when I get her in mount, I can finish it. Last time she was able to defend it. You know, so they were actually thinking about their jiu-jitsu and and trying to work on it in a way that we hadn't really seen. You know, kids would typically be like, oh, okay, can we get through the moves? When's game time? But now they're, you know, they it was encouraging them to uh to actually want to get better and train and practice and they were practicing, you know, before class and not often after class, but sometimes some of the kids were, you know, they wanted to get some more practice in. And and uh so the the that practice mindset and the those tournaments, we were like, okay, can we make this a little bit bigger? You know, because we were we were just going back and forth between us and this one other school. And so we invited another school. I so I went over there and I talked to the the kids instructor and and told them our vision, which was to make a a regular set of practice tournaments. So monthly, we can meet up and we can potentially meet at the different schools. We hosted the first one and uh which was this past Friday. And uh it went fantastic. We had 39 kids come and register and we just ran like little little super fights, one right after the another. We were in our two-hour block. We were able to get in 31 matches and everyone was cheering and and it felt like a little fight night. You know, so we're we're planning our next one. We're going to do it. We have a an actual tournament we're going to go to in May. So we're going to do one at the end of June. And uh we're going to try to get another school on board. We're refining the process so that we have a scoreboard now. We have, you know, so kids can see their points as they go. I think it's going to be really good because they're going to have regular competition, but it's going to be a place that's affordable for their families. Speaker 1: I love this idea of partnering with some of the other gyms in the area to provide these tournaments at a really, really low rate because we don't see a lot of that in jiu-jitsu. Many gyms are kind of loath to partner with the other gyms in their area because they see them as competitors. But what you've touched on is when you do that, when you start partnering with the other gyms, that's how you establish community. That's how you show that jiu-jitsu is about more than just a few competing local businesses, but rather it's a thing, it's a culture that people can buy into. And that's often very counter to the way that a lot of jiu-jitsu gym owners operate. I've observed that many gym owners in jiu-jitsu tend to have a very scarcity-based mindset where they're always looking at, you know, how can I shave off costs? How can I get every dollar possible? And they look at other gyms in the area as a threat. And the end result is that leads to a lot of short-term thinking that makes it really hard to grow and do cool things. So I think if you're trying to run a tournament with the intent of maximizing profit, I'm not saying that's a bad thing. There's definitely a place to do that. But however, if you're just getting out of the gate and you're trying to start a kids tournament, that approach, I can imagine, could make it really hard to get things going because, you know, things get expensive really quick. Whereas if you take a more benevolent approach, like you're talking about, where the goal is not so much to make a quick buck, but it's more to grow the sport locally, I think that's how maybe you can start laying the seeds for a really vibrant jiu-jitsu community once those kids start to get more experience. Speaker 2: Yes, for sure. When we first started, we had someone who was helping mentor us as he ran three karate schools locally. He said, look, like, make sure you're not viewing us and the other schools as the enemy, because we're not the enemy. Like, it's baseball and soccer and not that those things are our enemies, but they're the things that we compete with. Very rarely does do kids like go from one jiu-jitsu school to another. I mean, it does happen. I'm not saying that that's not a thing, but it's pretty rare. Like, most times, you know, when one of our kids says, hey, I'm going to have to put pause on my membership, it's because baseball season is coming or, you know, soccer is a big one. I don't know why people like soccer so much. I didn't play it, but they tend to get into that. And uh, you know, so having this idea that we can come together as a community, that's what we really need because if we're going to grow the jiu-jitsu level in our area, we have to have some competition, but we're also have to have some camaraderie with each other. So that our our technique can grow so that we can be on par, you know, in our area, Rochester, New York, with other areas like Austin now and the other areas that are around. If we want to get our jiu-jitsu really good, like we have to come together. We can't be fighting against each other. And that doesn't mean we're all like, oh, we'll all just have one big school and like, obviously, that's not what I'm saying, but we need to be able to collaborate together. So we're not getting jiu-jitsu injury within our schools, right? We we cross-pollinate and we all get better and then we're going to be uh able to rival some of the bigger school or bigger cities that are in the US. Speaker 1: Yeah, you bring up an interesting comparison there with soccer, you know, probably the most popular sport in the world. And I think a part of why it's so popular is just the accessibility of it. All you need to play soccer is a soccer ball and some friends. And in theory, with jiu-jitsu, you don't even need that many more friends. You just need one, right? I think that maybe in the past, the biggest obstacle to getting people into jiu-jitsu was the gi, just because of the cost of it. With no-gi getting more and more popular, you don't even really need that anymore. So, I think jiu-jitsu has the potential of achieving that level of accessibility as well, which I think would be very good for the sport. Speaker 2: Yes. The benefits and enjoyment that people get from jiu-jitsu when they learn to not be fighting to the death and just to kind of roll around and have the chess match. You know, it takes a little while for kids to get there, but once they do, it's really enjoyable. You can just grapple for 45 minutes an hour and not be, you know, you're going to it's going to be a good workout, but you're not going to be totally dead. Once that sort of playful mindset is there and jiu-jitsu, you know, especially no-gi, like the kids can get into that really, really quickly. And often they do. Like most the kids that are uh coming in here and then they start training, they're like, oh, this is like what I do with my brothers or sisters. You know, we hold some birthday parties for families that want to do that and, you know, they're allowed to invite their friends and and show them what they do in jiu-jitsu class. So you can always tell the kids that are don't really have any siblings and versus the ones that do and they get right into it and they're they're fine, you know, holding each other down and, you know, being put in some of the the awkward situations that jiu-jitsu presents. And they're like, oh yeah, this is fine. This is just like grappling with my siblings. Like, they have two older brothers or whatever it is. It's something that they're used to. Like animals and humans, like we love to wrestle and play. And no-gi jiu-jitsu is really good. It teaches them how to do that without hurting each other and to keep it playful. It's very, very accessible, like you were saying, compared to soccer. I truly believe that it could be be something that is part of our culture in the future. Speaker 1: The other thing about jiu-jitsu for kids that's so cool is when you get them into it really young, it's just another game for them. They don't get caught up in the same sort of mental traps that adults get into. Many people, you know, our age, when they start jiu-jitsu, they come into it with these preconceived notions about the UFC and that it's a fight. And you have decades of conditioning in your life about what violence may look like based on what you've seen on TV. And you've probably never in your life had this kind of experience where you've allowed a total stranger to get in that close proximity to you. And so many adults, especially those who take this more casually and less like a sport, they really struggle with the mindset of jiu-jitsu, with that keep it playful thing. And so a big challenge with many adults coming into jiu-jitsu is the first thing you have to do is break them of that fight or flight mentality and show them that this is a game. Whereas with younger kids, they just default to, hey, this is a game. I mean, with my daughter, I'm always so amazed and frankly kind of a little bit jealous about how easy it is for her to just go and make friends with other kids. You know, she'll just wander into a group and there's three other kids and they'll they won't even introduce themselves. They won't even say their names. They'll just immediately say, hey, let's play grounders. Who wants to play this? Who wants to do that? And they just immediately get right to the play. And so they don't get into their own heads the way that adults do. And I kind of think that if you could get kids at a younger age into jiu-jitsu, then as they get older, maybe they won't have those kinds of fears and hang-ups that a lot of people like you and I probably did getting into the sport maybe at a later age, at least as was the case for me. Speaker 2: Yeah, no, for sure. You know, I didn't get into I was a karate guy for 20 years with the idea of like, oh, that that looks like wrestling, you know, I don't know why the idea that wrestling wouldn't work was pervasive in the karate field. And I'll just never go to the ground. And getting over that, like you were saying, definitely was a challenge. And kids, they take to it so, so well. You know, and and that was one of our things, like, man, if if we could keep all these kids around, you know, our our school would like be fantastic. We'd have all these kids that were doing it from a young age. But the the challenge is like as they start getting older, they start leaving, you know, so we were really trying to focus on how because we saw the benefits of it, how to increase the, you know, we'll say the half-life of our students and get them so that they were sticking around into the their adult years, you know, so that they could get the benefits that you and I have from jiu-jitsu and having a physical activity that's more mentally engaging. Speaker 1: Now, how do you do that? Because with adults, they've already formed, right? And if they come into jiu-jitsu, they might like it, they might not. There may be reasons why they stay or why they go. But at the end of the day, they're kind of a fully formed person and if they like it, they're probably going to like it. If they don't, they probably won't. With kids, they develop so much. You know, a kid at five is completely different from the way they might be when they're 15. And again, completely different from the way they might be at 25. So you're dealing with a young human that is changing a lot over the years. And for a variety of reasons, with kids, you can get retention issues where they may quit for any number of reasons. Maybe something happens, they just decide that they don't love jiu-jitsu. Maybe they've they feel like their parents are forcing them into it, or maybe they just find another love. So retention with kids is important. You want to keep them in there if you can. What have you found works best for helping keep kids in the program, especially lessons you've learned that might be a little bit different from what people do with their adult students? Speaker 2: You know, so for my son, you know, so I I have the benefit of having kids that I have enrolled in our our jiu-jitsu program. You know, giving them something to work for is big. You know, so I I never pushed my son to compete. You know, we trained every single day and he was very, very skilled. But, you know, we didn't push him into competing until he was ready. And we took him to a tournament to watch and then he's like, oh, okay, that next one, I want to do that. And we let him pose the question. And so when he was eight years old, that's when he he did his first tournament. And the difference that, you know, I see in his training when he's in class, he takes it much more seriously when he's preparing for a tournament and and things like that. And so we really more regular. So we're very excited to start our practice tournaments and get that regular competition. I think it's going to cultivate the like the back of the drawing board, let me practice classes and just like class is not just the routine. Like, you know, I got a few weeks to prepare for my next competition. I think that back to the drawing board and like, okay, let me practice this. I think that is what's going to keep it fun and exciting long-term. You know, they certainly love their belts and getting their stripes and things like that. But like we do stripes and, you know, that's often not enough. Like once they get to a certain age, but I think like the actually like getting ready and the preparation and seeing the growth that they have, I think they get a lot of enjoyment from that. You know, so we're trying to have our practice tournament. We're not doing medals or trophies or anything like that. The participation in this event is the trophy itself, right? For our practice setup, we don't need to have the medals for now. You know, we've thought of we've toyed with different ways to maybe in the future have uh points or whatever school wins will get to take like a belt home or or something like that that could pass between the schools. And and we've had a number of ideas, but really the experience and the back and forth that I think is going to keep the kids going and and feeling and seeing their own growth. Speaker 1: Something that I think is really interesting about what you just said there regarding kids tournaments is the idea of having a no-stakes tournament with no medals on the line. And I think that's a cool idea because many tournaments when you start putting medals in display and you make it about who gets to go onto the podium, now this is a serious thing. It's not just fun and games anymore. And I think that can probably scare a lot of people off from trying tournaments in the first place. I'm not saying that there should never be medals on the line. You want to make sure that if people do want to take this seriously, that you have a way for that to happen. But you also don't want people to be afraid of starting a tournament because they just think it's serious and they don't want that relationship with the sport. For myself, as an example, I've never competed. And part of it was because it just was made out to be this big serious thing and I didn't want to have a big serious relationship with jiu-jitsu. You know, and I also don't want to compete with other people who are taking it super seriously when I'm not. You know, if their policy is tap, snap or nap, and and I'm a hobbyist white belt who's just looking for a physical outlet, I think we have a mismatch in expectations and I'm probably not going to participate in the tournament. Speaker 2: No, I see some guys that come into the tournament and they just look like they're already juicing at white belt and they're like all tan and they got the tattoos and I'm like, what? It's crazy. Speaker 1: Yeah, and so with kids, I mean, of course we want to give them an opportunity to make a profession out of this. Like you said, we want this to be able to go somewhere. But we also don't want people to think it's more serious than it has to be and we don't want to scare them off too early. So I love the idea of just having a casual tournament where there's nothing on the line because that keeps people in the mindset of this is just a game. It's not something we need to be too stressed out about. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. You know, and so kind of one of the things you had alluded to just there, you know, I see Danaher and Gordon Ryan and they're talking about like making jiu-jitsu, you know, something that someone could make a living from and I definitely appreciate the work that those guys are doing. You know, I'd love to see if he wants to, my son grow up and potentially be one of those world champions. And I want to do my part as a local school owner, you know, who's not really known by anybody to contribute to the growth of jiu-jitsu overall as something that can sustain athletes. And obviously I'm not a world champion myself. I've never trained up a world champion, but I can certainly like if we can get the culture of this growing and build a pool of athletes that will be able to feed into, you know, what we're what the higher up people in jiu-jitsu are trying to do. That would be an excellent contribution that I could do and a place that uh I could build for my kids and the kids out there. So in order to get jiu-jitsu into something that people will actually appreciate, like we have to treat it like a sport. Like it can't just be this back and forth like martial art esoteric sort of Eastern thing. I mean, everyone thinks of wrestling as a sport. There's no reason that no-gi jiu-jitsu couldn't be that exact same thing. You know, we just have to create the the pool of athletes and have the culture of competition that wrestling has. Speaker 1: Yeah, makes sense. Now, when we talk about competition, that changes the dynamic to some degree. There is now something on the line, even if there's no medals, this is now a win-lose game and it's less about play. So this is where you start to get into situations where we might turn off some kids from the sport or maybe we'll help them discover something that they really love about the sport if they're into that side of things. What's your experience as a coach in terms of managing the dynamics of competition with all of these kids? Speaker 2: So it can be challenging. So we've definitely had times before when we've gone to tournaments where, you know, say we have 15 kids go to compete where there's a few kids that walk away without any medals. And they always feel really bummed and, you know, you can definitely see it in their faces and getting them to compete again is often a bit challenging. We try to make up for it with our pool party and and things like that or after tournament celebration. But uh you can definitely tell like they're like, oh, this is kind of hard. You know, so for our, you know, our in-house tournaments, our practice tournaments, we were even calling them friendship tournaments to really put an emphasis on the the community building that we're trying to do. But uh the fact that they're individual super fights, we're not doing brackets. So we were out of the 39 kids that we just had, we were able to give most of the kids two matches and, you know, a few of the kids had three matches. But there's no brackets within the weight division. They were individual super fights just like a, you know, a WNO. And they ran back-to-back. And so the kids could come in with a fresh slate. They weren't saying, oh, well, I lost my first match. So now I'm only fighting for third place or fourth place. Like each fight was its own individual thing. And I think that the kids definitely were bringing that sort of energy and they the clean slate mindset was there. And the the lack of medals was also helping that. Since each fight was its own thing and there was no brackets, there was no first, second or third, it was like the pressure was off, is I think kind of what we're what we're getting there. Like they could be more in the moment and not have to be thinking about the podium or, you know, or my friends are going to get medals. Like everything was right there in that one match and they were able to put it out there and perform well. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well said. I think that especially with kids, the emphasis is probably less on who wins or loses this tournament because really it's a kids tournament. The stakes are not very high. And it should be more instead on let's maximize getting these people competition experience as much as you can so that it's not scary and so that when the stakes do matter, they'll be better prepared. I think that making a big deal out of who won the kids tournament is not a great idea. Speaker 2: No, definitely not. And so the other thing that I thought of while you're mentioning that, you know, we pay at least $100 to register for the tournament, not including travel expenses and meals and a hotel. But then we end up fighting each other. We get pulled together in the same divisions and we have to pay all this money for like fighting each other. Like it wasn't making sense. And we're certainly not going to withdraw from the few tournaments that we are able to do as a school. I think that having tournament circuits at amateur level is really, really important. But we were able to in our in-house tournaments create the situation where no one fought each other, right? So every match that the kids had was against someone from another school. And that's unfortunately like we're going to go to a tournament May 31st and there's a bunch of kids that are already in the same divisions. It doesn't make sense to be paying for that and not get the additional experience of fighting someone new. Speaker 1: Yeah, makes sense. I mean, if you're always just grappling with the same people over and over again, it's going to get boring at some point and at also at some point, it's just not really that different from your regular class, right? One of the cool things about competition is you get to expose yourself to new training partners, to try new things, to test yourself against different people. If it's just the same people over and over again, then it I think the appeal probably is not the same. So, here's a question. When it comes to kids, how do you manage their psychology? Something that I've observed with my daughter in jiu-jitsu or really anything is, you know, you want to make sure your kids don't develop avoidant behavior. Kids love to win at everything. If you let your kid control the rules of the game, they'll structure it so they always win. And if they lose, there's a good chance they might throw a tantrum. And so how do you work around that? Because a big part of building a good mindset is making people more open to the possibility of loss so they can work with that and it's not the end of the world should they not get the result they want. How do you do that with younger athletes? Speaker 2: We definitely have a big emphasis and part of this is what we talk about in class, like every single match, you're either winning or you're learning. And it sounds cliché and and just to say that to them, they're kind of goes over their heads. So we really like explain it like, well, if you win, you, you know, that's pretty good. But if you lose that match, we actually usually get more information like what your weak areas are that we can then use and practice and train so that when we try again, we're going to be better, right? I mean, if you just go out there and you win right away, you know, I mean, we get good information. We know, well, okay, you were you were really good at your your snap down and you go behind your rear naked choke. Like, we knew you were really good at that. But if you if you get caught in side control and you struggle escaping, well, now we've learned, okay, well, you're not very good at escaping side control. Let's let's specifically work to refine that. So really emphasizing and talking them through the learning process, I think helps them so that they can come back and try again. You know, like video games are really good because if they die, they can respawn and they try again. And sure, my kids still get frustrated at losing, you know, when they're playing their video games. But I'm like, hey, that respawn factor is there. And so with the tournament circuit that we're looking to do and have started implementing, because the frequency is high enough, they're going to be able to have that respawn factor. If they lose, they can practice and then next month they can try again. And so I find that ability to try again and not have it be final really helps with the psychological piece that you were referring to there. You know, so say there's a move that someone gets caught with. After the match, they're like, oh, man. And the next day when we're back in the gym, you know, we can really drill that piece that they were caught with and then we can spar with it so that they're they're able to do it live. And um they're like, okay, I'm ready. Like, I'm not going to that thing that they just got caught with is no longer scary. They're like almost hoping it happens so they get a chance to practice and and try the situation again. And um again, like that that that idea of respawning, I think is what helps with the the psychological piece. Speaker 1: I love that and I love that analogy because it is something that kids will understand, right? Relating it to gaming. And I think that also takes away the fear of this being a win-lose situation where you get one shot and you either get it or you don't. That puts a lot of undue stress on the kid for really no good reason when they're just learning jiu-jitsu. Whereas if you can make them look at this as more of a process and sometimes you get the result you want, sometimes you don't, but you get good feedback that can help you for the next time. That's a great approach to take. I find myself using that approach with my daughter often where when she's getting discouraged, I try now granted, I am not a child psychologist by any means, but I try to explain to her that this is a good thing if it didn't go the way that you want because it's feedback that you can use for the next time. You're not always going to get the result that you want, but the most important thing is that we take a little step forward every day so we keep getting better. That is way more important than the actual results of any individual tournament. That also is a mindset that I see adopted by the very best adult athletes as well. And I think again, one of the powers of jiu-jitsu is it's a great opportunity to instill that continuous improvement mindset in children before they grow up to be adults. Speaker 2: Yes. I also don't want to sugarcoat it for my son. Like losing sucks. Like no one no one likes to lose. Like I don't want to give him the idea of like, no, you should be all all Zen monk like and whether I win or lose, um it's all the same. Like, no, like losing sucks. We go out there, we're going to do our best and we're going to try to win. If we lose, that's fine. We're going to figure it out so we can come back and we can try to win again. The notion that, oh, it it's just have fun and just play games. Like other sports don't do that. The if we're like winning and losing is a thing. I mean, when they go out and they play soccer, like there's one team wins and one team loses. And I don't think that trying to sugarcoat it is good. I think teaching them to manage that loss and how to learn from it is the goal rather than teaching them, oh, it's no big deal. Like it doesn't matter. Like we were still happy to watch you play. And for sure that's true. But that piece is not going to help them. They might appreciate that, but they want to know how to win, right? You see it all the time. Like kids that start losing, they start acting really, really silly. And they do that because then they can get the laughs and they're not getting the, oh, you lost piece. They want to have those feel-good feelings. And so rather than have our kids lose and then turn into the just trying to be silly, we try to teach them how to learn from that loss, to manage the feelings that they're feeling because the stuff does matter. And no matter whether we make it low pressure or not, those feelings are going to be there. You know, but I think having it low pressure, so no medals on the line, that's going to make those feelings something that we can manage, right? So if it's a higher stakes tournament, the winning or losing is a bigger deal. And that loss might feel catastrophic. It'd be unmanageable for kids with their emotions. Whereas a lower stakes tournament and they lose, they're still going to have those feelings, but they're going to be something that are going to be more manageable so that they can work to deal with that loss so that when they compete at a higher stakes event, they're ready to handle that potentially catastrophic loss. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it there's different levels to this, right? I think and I think that's important to keep in mind. What some tournaments really do matter, some tournaments are lower stakes. And I think there's a benefit to having all of them. Um for the same reason that not every poker game needs to have a $10,000 ante in the hand, right? Sometimes you're just playing for fun. And if you never have that tier where people just play for fun, then you never have a ladder that people can use to climb up to those truly elite levels. So, someone who said this well was uh Rob Bernacki. We did a mindset course with them recently that we're going to start publishing soon. And something that he talked about was the need to balance on one hand, you obviously want to win, right? You want to try to win. Because you never want to get into a situation that you described where you expect to lose and so it starts to alter your behavior and you start to think and behave defensively. That's a very common thing where people will make excuses for their loss before it even happens. And that kind of demonstrates ultimately a lack of commitment to putting in effort because people are so afraid of losing that they withhold their effort so that they have an excuse for why they lost. And one of the examples of how that can manifest is when people come across as, I'm just goofing off, right? Well, part of why they're doing that is because they expect to lose and so they want to create excuses in advance that, hey, I I wasn't really taking this very seriously anyway. And that's not a good habit either. But on the flip side, you also need to accept the possibility of loss and make sure that should that happen, it doesn't completely destroy you mentally. So there's two sides to performance here. On one hand, you want to encourage people to put in the effort, but on the other hand, you don't want them to be so invested in the outcome of that effort that should they fail, that it emotionally destroys them or makes them lose their enjoyment of the sport, right? I mean, if an athlete is only good when they're winning, then they're not a great athlete. And especially given that statistically speaking, most people who enter a tournament, the vast majority will lose, right? It's important to build that in too. So as an adult, it's already hard to balance these two competing ideas, right? I need to try to win but be okay with loss. It's got to be even more difficult when you're dealing with a seven-year-old. I can only imagine. Speaker 2: Everything they feel, you know, so the such big feelings. You know, so my my four-year-old, like everything is huge and, you know, it either makes her cry or it makes her like jump up and down and be all super giddy. And and that's awesome. I love to see that, you know, but learning to handle these situations is one of the big benefits that sports gets and learning to handle that loss. And that really teaches good uh leadership and there's there's so many studies that have shown the benefits of sports in this emotional growth area. And so I think having the the frequency such that we can have the practice of losing frequently and winning frequently, that's what jiu-jitsu needs if we're going to compete with other sports and we're going to have a culture of athletes that grow up and are really, really good. So if if we're going to create this pool of athletes to help, you know, the overall jiu-jitsu community, we have to have that regular competition practice so they're learning how to handle the the loss. Speaker 1: Yeah, something that I've always felt especially for kids, I don't think in terms of their mental development if the kid is winning every single time, that's going to be that great for them. But if they get some experience losing and they can deal with that with grace and resilience, that's the real value. And so I think it's important when you're structuring these kids programs to make sure that everyone kind of gets a an opportunity to really give it their all. One of the weird things about kids, of course, is they grow and mature at such different rates. Even within adults, there's pretty big variance in terms of size and, you know, strength. But with kids especially, you can have two kids who are who are the same age and one is a foot and a half taller than the other one. And that can make it tough because you can have, especially for beginner kids, sometimes it just comes down to who's biggest, right? And that's a factor as well when you're organizing tournaments. So I think you have to be careful putting too much emphasis on who's winning and losing at a really young age because first of all, at that age, it's going to come down more to just who got big faster. But also the skill level at that point is so low anyway that really putting emphasis on wins and losses at that age before they've actually had an opportunity to really get invested in the sport, I think can set them up for challenges later on. You know, you can have someone who might just be crushing it at the younger kids divisions because they're so much bigger. But as soon as they get into like the teen division, suddenly they don't have that edge anymore. And that's when you can start losing the passion. So I'd love to know, as you're arranging these events, how do you account for that? Just the massive variability in terms of like size. Because in the adult divisions, we have ways to kind of cater around that. But in kids divisions, where they're often casual and, you know, the divisions are smaller, what do you do in situations like that? Speaker 2: You know, so we definitely we prioritize weight and age over rank. You know, so rather than, you know, and so we definitely tried to to put kids together and and have them matched with uh all three of those factors as closely as possible. But when it we like weight was our first one, such that the kids were within the same approximately the same weight category. And so for this one, we were we're getting ready for a grappling industries tournament in May 31st. And so we had our kids, we followed the grappling industries weight brackets and that's where they were matched up first. If we could then match them up by age, you know, then we did that as well. But weight was our main category that we went with. And then so for some kids, they can look to fight up, right? You know, if they're a little bit older, they can fight up a weight category. And so that would that the age matters a lot in kids. You know, so a seven-year-old versus a nine-year-old, even if they're the same weight, that nine-year-old is most likely going to trounce the seven-year-old just because they're able to think so much quicker and react so much quicker. Everything with a seven-year-old is almost like there's a a seven-second delay before they can process. And so that's the biggest thing that I've seen with kids is as they get older and once they're once they're around 13, they start thinking pretty quickly. But prior to that, it's slow. So weight is first, then age. You know, if we can match them up with experience level, then that's obviously a perfect match. And those are pretty good. And so yes, the divisions are small, you know, but with our kids, we had two matches for each person. You know, we're hoping in the next one to get two to maybe three matches each kid. And uh there were two kids that were almost exactly the same size and weight. They had to end up going twice. But for the majority of kids, every match was a different person and it it just kind of worked. Like the group went well. Speaker 1: Well, here's something I'd like to close off with then. If people are listening to this and they have a role as a a coach in their community and they see the value in this proposal, how can they go about doing this? Like what have you done and what could other people maybe duplicate if they want to do this in their area to help build a a local affordable circuit where kids can get a lot of cheap and easy competition experience? Speaker 2: You have to be able to have people that can ref, right? So I mean, so you have to make sure you know your rules and you have at least one person that can hold good fair refed matches. And so that was the first piece of this. And so we practiced in-house refing matches, learning the rules and and knowing the ins and outs of when things would get called. You know, that way we can be as close to tournament conditions as possible. You know, because there's a lot of nuances to jiu-jitsu rules. You know, if you have a front headlock where you get taken down, you know, that's not points until that front headlock is cleared, even if it's 30 seconds later. So someone that really understands those rules is key to this. And then the next piece is just getting the buy-in from another school. You know, so I went in person and and uh talked to the kid program directors and like explained my vision kind of in person. Like, like and and got them on board with us. I'm not a fan of texting and things like that. I think a lot of emotion gets lost in the talk. So in person, showed them what we're working on and what we're developing and the two schools so far were were really on board with it and uh we got a group. After that, we loaded, you know, we had to get all the the pieces. So the first two we had, we just had a timer. We didn't have any scoreboard and we just had someone that used a whiteboard to keep track of points. And then so for the next one, we got a a very simple scoreboard. The you could just flip the numbers over. I don't remember what sort of sort of thing it was. We got red and blue, you know, like sweatbands, the ref and the kids could wear. So it again, mimicked more closely tournament conditions. And um we're just slowly working on adding the uh the professionalism to it. But we're not going, you know, this is free events right now. So we're not overthinking the pieces. Like it's it's just keeping it simple, letting it sort of grow organically. What different schools buy into this idea. And I think that the ones that do, they will notice the difference in our kids when they they meet up at the grappling industries, the bigger style tournaments for kids. Speaker 1: I like that bit about not overthinking it because I think if you try to make the tournament seem too professional for kids, then you're going to start to attract a lot of the crazy parents. And and the nice thing about keeping it casual where, you know, maybe the tournament is even just in the gym, there's no medals on the line, it's just friendly, there's no crazy entrance fee. It sets the tone that this is low stakes. Whereas when you start trying to present your kids tournament like a big deal, you start to attract the crazy parent coaches who are going to just ruin the event, right? And cause all sorts of issues. And I I know that often when running kids programs, the biggest problem is not the kids, it's often the parents, right? So I'm guessing that managing expectations for the parents is probably a good idea. Speaker 2: Yes. Having fair refing is a big piece of this. That was my first thing. Like you got to have a referee or a few that can go back and forth that knows the rules inside and out. You know, I suppose you could just do submission only tournaments, but kids are they definitely need the points, most kids. It's not until they get a little bit better that they're good at finding submissions. So I wouldn't think that uh submission only would be super good for kids at this age. Speaker 1: Yeah, makes sense. Well, hey man, if people are in the area and they want to check out your tournament circuit or your gym or maybe if they just want to pick your brain for questions about how they could do this on their own, how can people find you and get in touch with you and learn more about your gym? Speaker 2: Awesome. So, um our Instagram handle is uh RP HX MA. You can check us out rochesterjiujitsu.com. We post these events live on YouTube. You can check those out there. And uh if you have any questions, like call call or text us and we'll we'll be happy to to share this. If we can get more people doing things like this and and get a grassroots jiu-jitsu circuit going around the country, like that would be that would be excellent. Speaker 1: Amazing, man. Well, I will put your links in the show notes to make it easy for people to find you. So if they want to check you out, just in your podcast player, pop that open, should be pretty easy to find. I'll also put a link to our stuff. We're also pretty easy to find. Everything we make lives at bjjmentalmodels.com. The podcast, all versions of our full-length and mini episodes are free, plus our newsletter. So at the bare minimum, check those out. But I always point out here that this whole thing is powered by BJJ Mental Models Premium. We don't run ads and the reason we're able to get away with that is because of our premium community. To really save you the details here, I mean, I can go on about the different features that might lead you to sign up, but I'll just keep it simple. The one thing that we will do is work really closely with you to try to level up your jiu-jitsu in ways beyond just learning new techniques. A big part of our focus is on streamlining the way people think about jiu-jitsu, on fine-tuning mindset, and also kind of tied into this conversation, finding and building community. So regardless of whether you are a white belt or a black belt community leader, the one thing that I can tell you that we can do for you that no other service on the internet can is we can work directly with you to actually improve the quality of your jiu-jitsu in a way beyond just learning new moves. So please do consider that if you haven't already. It's free for the first week, so definitely worth signing up. You sign up for that and of course you get access to our massive library of courses on strategy, tactics, concepts, most delivered through audio, but also a ton through video as well. There's also premium podcasts that you can only get through there, like Emily Kwok's podcast and Rob Bernacki's podcast. So please do consider signing up for premium if you haven't already. bjjmentalmodels.com is where you go to do all of that, but I will also put a link to that in the show notes too. But Brendan, thanks for coming by, man. This is a great one. This is a topic that I'm personally quite passionate about because I really think that the key to growing the sport is to invest in kids programs. Those are going to be the adults who dominate the sport 10, 20 years from now. So really getting kids involved early. I think that's how we go from taking jiu-jitsu from this kind of weird fringe sport, which it still is, to maybe something a bit more mainstream like a lot of the other bigger martial arts. So, thanks so much for coming by and sharing all of this. Speaker 2: Thank you for having me, Steve. It was a pleasure. Speaker 1: Most welcome. Thanks to the listeners too. Appreciate you as well. And we'll talk to you next time. See you then.