Bryan Baste | Staff Writer
MMA is as popular as ever with the UFC being one of the biggest sporting associations in the US.
With tons of videos with fighters like Sean Strickland, Connor Mcgregor, and Israel Adesanya getting millions of views and fights quickly being the most talked about sporting event that weekend.
This sudden boom of MMA interest has motivated many students to take up martial arts. Students like Eduardo Gonzalez, a junior communications major, have taken power into their own hands, by Creating FIU’s MMA club.
Gonzales had been doing Muay Thai since he was 16-17 years old before FIU and was training mainly at a gym before creating the club.
“I’m a martial artist – you know when I first came to FIU, I was like, I’ll keep training at my gym, but there’s got to be an MMA club at FIU. Your school with 55,000 kids has to have an MMA club, um, and then there wasn’t one, so then I reached out to Justin because I knew he trained MMA.”
Justin or Justin Jean-Baptiste, a senior English (linguistics) major, and president of the MMA club was the friend that Gonzales referred to.
Through Justin, Gonzales also met Samuel Rojas, a junior double majoring in Finance and International Business, who just so happened to be creating an MMA Group chat for fellow students. From there, they added anyone interested, and thus, the MMA club was born.
The club meets every Tuesday and Thursday at 7 pm on the turf near Parkview. I went to their Tuesday meet-up last week, where they were doing a training session with the wrestling club.
Each meeting starts with a quick warm-up of running a couple of laps, followed by some stretching. Then, they work on drills, which differ from meeting to meeting because each meeting focuses on a different martial art. For example, one day, they could focus on boxing, and the next, on Muay Thai.
After these drills they will then go into light sparring so that every participant can safely practice and implement techniques practiced in drill but in a real sparring/fight scenario.
This meeting they were focused on mainly wrestling due in part to the collaboration with the wrestling club.
The MMA and wrestling club train together | Bryan Baste
I also spoke with students who attended this martial arts meeting to talk about what brought them there and why you, me, or anyone else should consider joining the club.
One student I spoke to, Andre Cospin, a junior political science major, pointed out many rewarding aspects of the club. “Even if you don’t wanna fight, it’s a great way to stay active – you meet great people through it. It adds discipline to your life, right, it adds a consistent schedule – a consistent rhythm to your week.”
“And your confidence skyrockets, you feel better about yourself, you look better, etc.”
Another student, Tyara Panella, a freshman international business major, talked to me about the challenges of being a woman in a mainly male-dominated club.
“So joining a male-dominated club it’s always a little nerve-wracking at first. I was very nervous to join, and I was like, oh are they gonna be mean? But they are so nice!”
Students from the MMA and Wrestling club collaborate and train together | Bryant Baste
“So never let nerves be your deterrent, if you’re really interested in something you have to just go for it whether you’re a girl or a boy.”
The main sentiment I took away from the students I talked to is, to go out and try new things you never know if you’ll like it, and who knows it could be the hobby you never knew you needed.
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