Brown belt Current belt

August 1, 2005Cape Coral Florida / USA

21 years, 2 months, 8 days

I was promoted on a Saturday morning during an outside training session in the beginning of the month. I was so long ago I can not remember the exact day but I do remember he had me rolling for over 30 min straight doing a round robin that day I got promoted. This was just before Paulo went back to Brazil. I took sometime back in 2007 to train at Tiger Schulmans with Uriah Hall in Queens but after Uriah's Career took off I moved to upstate NY and began rolling 1-2 times per week again while working in PA. I was traveling to PA to train as I was doing a project out there for work for about 6 months and that is where I trained with Professor Rogerio Taborda. He actually refused to let me where my brown belt until I proved I was actually a brown belt since it had been sometime since I had trained Jiu Jitsu. After about 4 months he awarded me my Brown Belt again. Now my time is mainly dedicated to helping domestic violence survivors and their children recover from the abuse they suffered. I am actually putting an Empowerment program together for the families we serve. So training again fulltime has meaning again for me. To be honest I did lose sight of things for sometime which is why my training of the past years has been so on and off, but I have a much bigger reason to train now, to help change the lives of thesefamilies to hopefully give them a better chance at surviving an attack if it god forbid ever happens to one of them again and to help build their confidence. So taking time away from my businesses day to day so i can train is something I can rationalize now. I guess my priorities had changed for a while and saw it as more important to grow my business than train fulltime but now those 2 things have overlapped and I see even more clearly why my continued study of jiu jitsu is so important.