A lot of people don't view jiu jitsu as a sport that was made for women, as it is for men. Although the sport has an evident, growing number of women every year, it is still hard to attract women to the gym to try out a class. At my jiu jitsu school, Zicro BJJ, we have about seven women that train jiu jitsu compared to the numerous amount of guys that train with us. My teammate Jasmine and I are always talking about how we want more experience training with other women with different styles of jiu jitsu in order to prepare us for competition. We decided, along with another group of girls, to start a women's open mat where we could get together about once every two months and train.
Today, Jasmine and I made a three hour trip down to Jacksonville, Florida for our second women's open mat at Luiz Palhare's jiu jitsu school. As soon as we walked into the school, everybody was so kind and welcoming. We had a great turnout of about 15 girls from all over Florida. Rolling and training with people of all different ranks and sizes was definitely an amazing experience. Because we were all from different schools with different teachers, everybody had their own unique game. Some girls were guard players, while others were mainly trying to pass and play top the whole time. I feel like I learned so much today just from sparring with different women. It wasn't as much of, "I'm going to see how many people I can beat today," but instead, we all just shared techniques and different ideas to benefit each other.
After we trained for about two and a half hours, we all made our way next door to the Brazilian Cafe to get some lunch after a long training session. We were able to socialize even more over some delicious Brazilian food and, of course, some acai bowls. Even though I just came to Jacksonville to train jiu jitsu, I met some great people today that I hope to continue to see at every women's open mat that we organize.
If any women are interested in coming to a potential women's open mat, please feel free to email me for more information!
Email: BeverlyBJJ@gmail.com
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