My 2022 Year in Review with FloGrappling
I started working for Flo on a freelance basis after training with and staying in touch with one of the content managers, whom I met while traveling through Austin, Texas in Summer 2021.
About a year later, when he was in need of freelancers to start writing event previews and recaps, I threw my hat in the ring.
Here are links to my (17!) pieces on the site from the tail end of 2022 and a few thoughts about each and what I loved about writing them. May the best be yet to come in 2023!
August 2, 2022: Nicholas Meregali Is The Perfect Test Of Lovato's "Timeless" Jiu-Jitsu
This piece was special to me for two reasons. First, it was my first published piece. Second, I had some meaningful skin in the game for it, having trained at Lovato Jiu-Jitsu HQ in Oklahoma City from August-October 2021 while on my road trip. There’s a lot I could say about Rafael Lovato Jr—and I lot I will say in the book—so I’ll hold back in the spirit of not spoiling too much of my own plot here.
What fascinates me most about this piece, in hindsight, is how this fight fits into the narrative of his last professional competitive season. Earlier in 2022, Lovato had won the European Championship in the Adult Heavyweight division. He then competed in the IBJJF Worlds Championship in June and “retired from the gi” in the Walter Pyramid. After this “clash of generations” fight with Meregali in August, Lovato went on to fight at ADCC 2022 in September, and concluded his year with a final submission grappling event in Japan, which he considered his “farewell” and closure to his previous era in his career.
A retired MMA fighter, business owner, respected competitor, and now a father to twins, he embodied what he preached with his “Timeless Jiu-Jitsu” courses and sought to live up to his weigh-ins T-shirt during the tail end of the year: “last round, best round.”
August 22, 2022: Pun vs Enriquez To Headline Finishers Summer Bash In Battle Of Rising Stars
This was a bit of a selfish opportunity to write about my two “hometown heroes” going head to head: Trinity Pun is a teenage BJJ wunderkind and tri-state area athlete who frequently trains with folks in the town I grew up in. Alex Enriquez is the female featherweight star out of my gym in Atlanta who is one of the black belts to watch on the pro circuit, especially in no gi. Both of them are very young, and I expect this to be the first of many matchups
September 14, 2022: Amy Campo's Rise From Relative Unknown To ADCC Contender
I loved Amy Campo ever since her 2021 Worlds Run, but when she won West Coast Trials in April, I became especially hooked. She was certainly tall, athletic, and good, but she had a well-balanced, meat-and-potatoes kind of style I felt I could watch and emulate. Her attitude, focus and demeanor in competition and press were inspiring. Her humility and graciousness were as winning as her performances in competition.
Campo came in as a heavy underdog for the ADCC World Championships, with most pundits betting on pretty much anyone but her to win the 60+kg women’s division. If I were a gambling lass and had put my money where my mouth was by formally betting on Amy, I’d have walked out of Vegas having made a killing. Days later, this piece aged like a fine, dry-aged Tomahawk steak. Campo won the whole thing in gorgeous, historic fashion.
September 17, 2022: ADCC 2022 60+kg: What to Watch in the First-Round Matchups and ADCC 2022 -60kg: What to Watch in the First-Round Matchups
In the past, FloGrappling (and the grappling world in general) has gotten a lot of dings for poor coverage and support of the women in the sport. There are at least two other female freelance writers in the mix, who, along with me, have been working to improve this from the inside.
ADCC previews were one area of opportunity I felt strongly about covering for more than just “I’m a girl who wants to see more writing about the girls” reason. These were some of the most talented and tested athletes in the entire sport.
I don’t think these articles got a ton of exposure beyond my pushing them on my own social media, but I remember being very proud of them as I punched the keys, hard, on my flight to Vegas up until going to bed that night, equal parts hyped and jet lagged.
September 18, 2022: Standouts, Shutdowns, Submissions, & More: the Best Matches from ADCC Day 1 , Meet Your ADCC Finalists , and ADCC 2022: 3 Bronze-Medal Matches with Gold-Medal Action
I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard on so much writing in a single day as I did pumping out these three pieces from the sidelines of the Thomas and Mack Center floor and the Marriott Hughes Center.
Ask my fiancé and my friend who was doing photography: I was very un-fun to be around that day as I wrote these pieces. I was keyed into my laptop with a self-alienating kind of focus that made me dead to the arena filled with rapt, screaming grappling fans. I subsisted on Diet Coke, Peanut M&Ms, and the corn chips that come with nacho cheese at sporting events. I felt like I was back in college, running on fumes at the end of the final exam period. Being in Vegas, I also began to understand the appeal of Hunter S. Thompson taking his uppers and downers to survive his time writing and reporting for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
I developed a whole new kind of empathy and understanding for live sports reporters. To do this kind of work professionally, routinely, at the highest level, and at scale, is extremely challenging. Any time I had chastised FloGrappling for type errors in writing or failed to understand how ESPN reporters made a gaffe over live video—officially withdrawn and forgiven.
These pieces aren’t Pulitzer candidates in the slightest (and, in fact, they look pretty crappy and light), but enduring the day I wrote them and pulling these pieces together was one of the most challenging, fulfilling, and fruitful experiences of my 2022. That’s how hard it was.
October 3, 2022: Amy Campo Made ADCC History, Becoming First-Ever American 60+ kg Champion
Amy Campo killed it and defeated the odds against her. Her road to the finals included defeating Elisabeth Clay (a talented rival whom she has faced repeatedly in her career), Gabi Garcia (one of the greats and most famous women in jiu-jitsu), and Rafaela Guedes (whom I have trained with and learned from personally—her heart is as great as her grappling is fearsome).
Becoming the first 60+ kg American champion in history, Campo is a hopeful sign of big things to come for American female grapplers in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
October 9, 2022: The Year Of The Comeback: 4 IBJJF Greats To Return For No-Gi Pans
I love writing about a good comeback and a good underdog. This piece checked both those boxes for me.
One of the big inspirations for the piece was my new coach in Atlanta, Bruno Frazatto—he’s one of the five people I cover in this piece. He’d opened a gym, had a whole lot of changes in his life since his last, big competition (roughly three years ago ADCC 2019). He was now a father to two girls, a gym owner, and a man with a whole lot of reasons to chill out and enjoy the fruits of his labors instead of pushing himself, at 38, to do a camp for the Adult division and go up against an army of hotshots between 18-29 years old.
He’d won both No Gi Pans and No Gi Worlds at Masters 2 Featherweight in 2021. “Too easy!” he said with a smile, when asked why he didn’t stay in his “appropriate” age division. Bruno’s fire and desire to continue challenging himself inspired me, especially as he gave so much time, energy, and effort into his athletes as they made their respective runs at the IBJJF No Gi Majors in 2022.
In the end, a handful of those I wrote about in this piece did not compete (including Bruno, who had to withdraw), but the punchline and the merit of this piece still rings true. It is uplifting and awesome to watch how people who have been out of the game come back to the game, whether after injury, pregnancy, opening a gym, retirement, or some other life change taking them off the mats or shifting their focus away from competition.
October 23, 2022: Claire North Captures Medusa Title With 3 Quick Submissions
True to the desire of improving coverage about female athletes, I took up the opportunity to write about one of the key all-female promotions in the no gi and combat jiu-jitsu space: Medusa. Two of the most enjoyable parts of writing about the third edition of Medusa were watching the successes of two people I’d personally rolled with: Peyton Letcher (who graciously dusted me at a tournament in San Diego in January and made it to the Bantamweight finals of Medusa 3) and Zelie Dolan (a training partner of mine while at Atos in San Diego, who had since moved to Austin and had a great big-stage debut with a victory by heel hook in a Medusa 3 Superfight).
October 24, 2022: Breakout Opportunity For Underdog Janaina Lebre At IBJJF FloGrappling GP
Like Amy Campo, Janaina was very much an “always a bridesmaid, never a bride” kind of character, consistently overshadowed by bigger names despite her remarkable performances. Even as she had racked up a series of impressive wins against some of the toughest women in the hardest division in women’s jiu-jitsu, no one in BJJ could have told you who Janiana Lebre was until the Grand Prix—and even then, her name would have elicited a “Who?”
But that wouldn’t be true for much longer…
November 1, 2022: Janaina Defies Odds With Historic Win At First Female IBJJF FloGrappling GP
“Hey, can you get a few quotes from her for the piece?” my editor said.
I shyly DM-ed Lebre in half-English, half-Portuguese with a few questions before hopping on a plane from New York to Boston. She replied enthusiastically within a day. I was stoked to be able to actually reach out to someone I was writing about instead of cull the internet for interviews, stats, and quotations. I pulled the piece together in a Yotel hotel room on my “vacation week” from my day job (which is not with FloGrappling 😂 ), “relaxing” while consolidating this on a deadline.
Lebre was lovely and the way she spoke about her preparation, her faith, and her mental training was refreshingly sincere in a sport where there can be a lot of meme-y behavior and trash talk. I wish I’d met her while training in San Diego. After this historic win at the first-ever All-Female Grand Prix, I can’t wait to watch her next gi season. Black Belt Female Lightweights, watch out.
November 14, 2022: From Midland, TX To Tezos WNO: Emily Fernandez Is On The Rise
When mapping out places for my cross-country road trip x BJJ sabbatical, Bruno Bastos’ gym in Midland, Texas was a middle-of-nowhere place that was high on my list for three reasons:
Midland was one of the key places featured in one of my favorite pieces of sports journalism, the book, Friday Night Lights
When asked by teammates in Houston places in Texas they recommended we train after leaving Houston, multiple people spoke highly of Bastos’ gym and of Bastos himself—not just as a coach and competitor, but as a person.
Emily Fernandez. She was a total killer with a nasty game out of closed guard. Even people who saw her moves coming could do little to stop them. She fascinated me as a competitor who was completely homegrown by Bastos, doing BJJ since she was a kid, and building her life around jiu-jitsu amid the Midland oil fields.
I especially enjoyed writing about Emily because no one else seemed to be paying attention to her, overshadowed by a star-studded card. Almost all the coverage ahead of her specific matchup was about her opponent, Rosa Walsh, for a number of reasons: Rosa had had some recent, solid wins in no gi (ADCC Open, No Gi Pans), was a competitor on a big-brand team (Pedigo Submission Fighting), and was a key training partner of 2022’s most objectively-successful female grappler (Ffion Davies). In contrast, Fernandez was a lower-key figure who was less obviously marketable: a steady and proficient competitor, most recently in the gi, but who but didn’t have the same kind of easy hype as Walsh.
This made watching Emily win with a slow burn to dominance all the more awesome.
November 18, 2022: Zach Kaina vs Dudu Granzotto: A Rivalry Builds At IBJJF GP
The IBJJF Grand Prix typically pits top black belts against one another in their brackets and super fight matchups. I wanted to take this preview because it was the first-ever Brown Belt matchup in the Grand Prix’s history.
I knew about Zach Kaina mostly from following his girlfriend on Instagram: Jesse Khan, one of the young, black belt female hotshots out of Art of Jiu-Jitsu. I knew nothing about Eduardo Granzotto, but thought his nickname, “Dudu” was funny. The more I dug into their respective games and their backstory together as competitors from Juvenile 1 to Brown Belt Adult, the more intrigued I became. By the time I watched the two of them on the card, I was fully hooked into the what is bound to be a Featherweight rivalry for years to come.
The research I did for this story would also pay off, big time, in my last piece of the year.
November 29, 2022: Amanda Bruse Looking To Polish Off Breakout Year At No-Gi Worlds
Amanda was one of the people I most respected while training at Atos HQ. Somehow she was training full-time, starting a women’s BJJ apparel business, and applying to a psych degree program at UCSD. My standout memories of her include asking what was on her reading list (at the time, the classics of Napoleon Hill), making lattes (she was a barista at HOB Coffee at the time), and then came to the mats like a killing machine.
She had a tremendous run at No Gi Pans, and I was secondhand crushed when she fell short at No Gi Worlds. Putting personal biases aside, I think she was the best grappler in that bracket and is one of the best in her weight, period, right now. She proved it in the toughest ADCC Trials in history—the 2022 ADCC West Coast Trials— I think she would have won her finals match at No Gi Worlds on any other day (or 99% of the time if you ran a simulation of it).
I’ve got an interview with her from before I left San Diego that I hope to recap and publish here in 2023, likely ahead of the next ADCC Trials.
December 16, 2022: Zach Kaina Grinds Through 5 Matches to Win No-Gi Worlds, Earns Black Belt
Running on empty by the end of 2022 but glued to my phone watching No Gi Worlds, I pulled out one more piece for Flo. As soon as I saw both Dudu and Kaina were entered in the Featherweight bracket for Brown Belt at No Gi Worlds, I hoped they might match for another rubber match. They did in the quarterfinals. After losing to Dudu three times by points in the last few months, the fourth time proved the charm for Kaina. Zach won by a nasty heel hook and punched his ticket toward the semifinals, and proceeded to go the distance in two more hard-fought matches.
Kaina had an incredible road to the top of the podium, with his promotion to black belt being the icing on the cake. This piece came out the morning after I got my own promotion to brown belt and personally reinforced how far I have to go in learning how to be a good brown belt.
Closing Out in 2022, Onward to 2023
It’s been a pleasure writing for Flo and getting my reps in sportswriting. I’m hoping this is just the beginning of my publication track record in the space. As I wrote, I hope to continue elevating and setting a new standard for the quality of jiu-jitsu content out in the world.
May these pieces have done one small thing, for aspiring and ace grapplers alike, to help them keep growing, staying in love, thinking deeply, and learning more about the sport that has them (double under-)hooked.