A Weekend With Gaidama: The Making of the Fourth Annual Epic Open Mat

I’m hanging out with some of the most elite submission grapplers on the planet, and we’re all deeply engrossed in a conversation about, of all things, the art of capturing wild roosters.

Amanda “Tubby” Alequin, a ONE Championship athlete and ADCC Trials champ – who also happens to be a longtime farm owner – counsels fellow Gaidama ambassador Chrissy Briggs on how to corner the wild rooster that’s been terrorizing Briggs’ Philadelphia neighborhood. The rooster, it seems, has proven shockingly evasive – but Tubby’s unfazed. After all, at last count, she owned a coop of nearly twenty chickens. As such, in addition to being one of the top-ranked strawweight contenders in the jiu-jitsu world, Alequin knows a thing or two about herding stubborn fowl.

I laugh, and crack a wry joke about how chasing after chickens and roosters is probably good supplementary cardio for combat sports athletes.

Tubby flashes a megawatt smile at me. “Hey, Rocky did it!”

She’s not wrong.

It’s the kind of zany, laughter-filled conversation that goes part and parcel with a weekend like this one. Each year, Gaidama hosts a multi-hour photoshoot for the brand’s sponsored athletes, followed by an “Epic Open Mat” for the public. Tickets to the Epic Open Mat buy attendees access to jiu-jitsu seminars, catered goodies, and opportunities to meet some of Gaidama’s fan favorite professional athletes, who serve as enthusiastic brand ambassadors.

This particular weekend, approximately 200 Gaidama fans of all ages, ranks, and genders have purchased tickets to descend on the fourth annual Epic Open Mat here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

They get their money’s worth. In addition to an Air Force Special Warfare sponsored jiu-jitsu seminar by black belt gym owners and Gaidama brand ambassadors Erin and Dan Ries, fans are treated to a seminar and meet-and-greet with beloved YouTube celebrity Master Ken, of Ameri-Do-Te fame.

Kendall Vernon – founder and CEO of Gaidama – can’t hide her grin when I ask how she landed that particular act for this year’s event. “It was kind of serendipitous, honestly!” she admits. “We ran into [Master Ken] at ADCC Worlds, and started having a conversation about it, and one thing led to another, so we decided to incorporate it into this event, and it worked out perfectly.”

It’s that exact sort of spontaneous, infectiously friendly energy that infuses these thirty hours in Tulsa. Gaidama ambassadors come from every walk of life imaginable, but are unified by two things: indisputable excellence in the sport of jiu-jitsu, and a genuine warmth of spirit.

“I’m feeling amazing!” says ADCC West Coast Trials champion and Worlds veteran Lyzz Mitrovic. This is her first ever Epic Open Mat, and it’s exceeded all her expectations. “The [Air Force] seminar was wonderful, having a seminar by Master Ken was excellent – and I cannot believe the spread that they have for catering.”

Mitrovic – who’s gleefully spending her thirty-fourth birthday here on the mats in Tulsa with us – grins, as she snags one of the fox-frosted cookies from the catering table. “Look at this!” she exclaims, holding up the cookie. Upon further examination, we discover that the cookies are all intricately frosted to match the Art Wear prints on Gaidama no-gi gear. It’s a tremendous feat of visual artistry – with a delicious taste to match.

“I’ve never spent a whole birthday weekend doing jiu-jitsu before, so this is brand new,” Mitrovic adds. “But it’s so wonderful. I just feel really blessed to be around so many wonderful people […] It’s just an awesome experience.”

“It was really nice to hang out with people on the same journey,” agrees newly-minted black belt and JJCon no-gi champ Beatrice Jin. “A lot of us run our own gyms, run our own training, [and] are trying to balance being an athlete with everything else in life. It's a unique sort of pressure that it felt like all of the ambassadors universally understood without saying. Kendall and Karla have done an amazing job bringing athletes who kind of vibe the same way together.”

Mo Black – another ADCC Worlds veteran, perhaps best known for defeating teen phenom Helena Crevar in the finals at East Coast Trials – provides the proof in the pudding for Jin’s words. When she’s not competing on the world stage, Black runs a jiu-jitsu gym out of Colorado Springs – a neighborhood she happens to share with fellow Gaidama ambassador Erin Ries, who co-owns a gym of her own with husband Dan Ries.

“It’s really awesome,” says Black. “Erin and Dan have been open longer than we have – they opened right around Covid, and then we opened about two years after that, so around 2022. Being able to be so close to each other, we do a lot of cross-training, and both of our gyms have a lot of women in them. So, we’ve been doing these women’s open mats, where we’ll bring people all the way down from Denver, and it’s been a lot of fun.”

Black and Ries’ respective students – particularly the women – also take cues from the example set by their coaches. With the rapid growth of the female participation at both gyms, Gaidama’s fox logo has become a common sight on the mats in Colorado Springs. “If you look around [at our students], the majority of the women will always be wearing something Gaidama,” says Black, laughing. “It’s really cool.”

Erin, who’d signed on as a Gaidama ambassador a few years before Black did, was thrilled when she heard that her friend and training partner would be joining the fox club. “She was definitely excited,” recalls Black, with a wide smile. The two have been collaborating on social media content and filming Gaidama videos together ever since.

“We’re still working on this, but we’re gonna try to collab on some more videos and stuff,” Black adds. “[Erin and I] have done some training videos together, both wearing our [Gaidama] gear, and stuff like that, but we’re gonna try to put some more stuff together for sure.”

To have two female black belt gym owners, sponsored by the same brand, within easy driving distance of one another, used to be almost unheard of. “I think it’s so cool,” says Black. “We’re both female business owners, and being able to be be associated with, and sponsored by, and supported by a brand that’s also women-owned is just really great to see – to see all these powerful women, coming up and being a part of jiu-jitsu.”

The message here is clear: camaraderie is abundant not only among Gaidama ambassadors themselves, but in those they work with, mentor, and train with. Good culture, after all, begets good culture.

It helps that Gaidama ambassadors – for all their major sporting accolades and musclebound physiques – aren’t afraid to indulge the fun-loving, goofy, and sometimes just plain geeky side of the personalities. I spend a solid ten minutes chatting with Katie Egan – a black belt Pan-American masters’ champion and one of the IBJJF’s top-ranked adult no-gi competitors in the world – and Dan Ries about their mutual love for Dungeons and Dragons.

When I ask Egan – known for her social media technique reels – whether we can expect a D&D-themed reel from her any time soon, she laughs. “I definitely am a huge nerd, and I would love to do that,” she tells me. “I just need to figure out how to cross my two hobbies together.”

Katie and Dan bond at length over their respective D&D campaigns, having both successfully recruited several of their own jiu-jitsu teammates to participate. I suggest, at one point, that Brazilian jiu-jitsu is itself a sport that attracts what I call “jock-nerd hybrids”: exactly the sort of people who’d spend say, an hour scrambling around with collegiate wrestlers at open mat, and later that day, another hour roleplaying fantasy characters and rolling novelty dice. Dan nods heartily in agreement. “I think that’s very true,” he tells me.

Dungeons and Dragons has a lot in common with jiu-jitsu, as it turns out. Both require focus, creativity, and tremendous generosity of time. In that sense, if you’re already spending all your spare time at your local jiu-jitsu gym, your teammates – who are conveniently at the same place, merrily trying to tear your limbs off your body – might actually be your best bet for starting a campaign.

As athletes who – by virtue of the role they’ve taken on as brand ambassadors – exist increasingly in the public eye, Gaidama’s grapplers also put a lot of thought into the version of themselves they present to the world.

“For my technique reels, I’ll actually set aside one day of the month, and I’ll get three or four training partners, and we’ll do three outfit changes,” Egan explains to me. As a full-time competitive black belt athlete, she’s mindful of how she manages her time, particularly when it comes to creating social media content.

“We do three no-gi, and three gi moves, and I’ll be wearing a different [Gaidama] set with each person,” says Egan, “so I’m creating all this content, but it’s not done all through the month – it’s actually just one day, and then I have all the content made for the next month.”

She takes a lot of inspiration from the unique artwork that goes into Gaidama prints. “I definitely want to do a Halloween-themed reel,” she tells me. Like many of the Epic Open Mat attendees, she’s fallen hard for Gaidama’s latest spooky season themed drop, a special Halloween Wotto doodle print. “I love Halloween in general,” she adds, grinning.

Meanwhile, Beatrice Jin describes her own social media presence as a sort of playfully exaggerated – but nonetheless authentic – expression of her own personality. “I definitely feel like my Instagram account has shifted towards comedic relief along with the usual competition posts,” says Jin. “I felt like everyone was kind of posting the same sort of content using the same sort of phrases and after seeing posts like that over and over, it all became sort of meaningless, even though the competitive achievements were actually big events and important stepping stones in athlete careers. I honesty just wanted to be a little different, so I would stand out.

“This is kind of cliché, but I took a lot of inspiration from Craig Jones. He said that the laziest kind of advertisement is posting an unboxing of a product and selling it straight to the user. He said it was much better to be doing something really interesting, and just happen to wearing or using the product you actually want to advertise. That's kind of what I try to emulate now.”

Jin’s own small business venture – Buttscooter Jiujitsu, which makes premium BJJ-themed stickers that frequently feature playful puns and cute cartoons – is just one example of how she’s drawn on her own personality and sense of humor to stand out from the usual jiu-jitsu crowd.

“I honestly just thought the art space in jiu-jitsu is pretty underwhelming right now,” admits Jin, when I ask her how her stickers were born. “A lot of it is very macho and loud, or the opposite, totally black and white and oversimplified. I wanted to make something funny and cute, that wasn't too serious about itself, that people could still sport proudly on their everyday gear and accessories.”

There’s a lot of emphasis on authenticity among all the Gaidama ambassadors I talk to. Everyone’s on a slightly different journey: some are in the thick of training camps for this year’s no-gi Pans and Worlds, others building professional MMA careers, and still others focusing on developing their skills as instructors and gym owners. All of them are trailblazers in their own way – but during this weekend, immersed in a community of likeminded athletes, it’s clear to me that none of them are walking alone.

As seminars wrap up, and the real party – complete with catered food and open mat rounds – begins, I manage to catch Kendall Vernon for one last chat.

“Honestly, I’m trying really hard not to cry right now, and save it for afterwards,” she confides.

We both take a moment to drink in the ambience around us: the laughter, the music, the animated conversations between grapplers of all ages and genders.

“We worked so hard,” says Kendall. “We put so much effort and energy into this event, and you know, we reached this climax point, and now the party opens up, and everyone can relax and have a good time.”

How does she feel about the general success of this year’s Epic Open Mat?

The woman who created the brand that’s brought over 200 people together for one weekend in Tulsa just smiles at me. “I’m just so thankful for all the people that are here, and all the support that we have.”

And that’s the Gaidama spirit in a nutshell.

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