Mundials, lightweight gi shipping coupons, and NAGA report....

Great post on Graciemag here, collecting fifteen years' worth of timeless phrases, exclamations, and comments about matches or competitors at the Worlds. I think this would be a great beginning for an afternoon of youtube. Take the day off work, plop on the couch with your laptop, and start following the rabbit trails. Could be very educational!

Of course that's not what I'm doing. Sigh.

Lana Stefanac and Gabrielle Garcia, of course.

Another interesting post from Graciemag with a detailed analysis of the womens' brown/black divisions at Mundials with their picks for champion in each.

Also-- congrats to my husband Mitch for making blue! Yay! He's been training with Sean Cooper for a while now and I know he is developing a solid game there. Wooo!

Regarding lightweight gis for Mundials... my sponsor MMAOutlet.com has a great sale going on right now. First, they've cut shipping costs. For free UPS Ground, use coupon MUNDGR. 40% off UPS 3-DAY Select or 2 day Air - Coupon MUNDAIR. These prices are good till June 6th. And they're selling some gis I've never seen! Of course we all know the Vulkan Ultralight (I have it, I love it, I patched it all up and it's my competition gi for IBJJF stuff.) But now Atama also makes an Ultra Lite that's even lighter weave than the single, with a competition cut and rip-stop pants for lightness and durability. And Gameness now makes a "Feather" gi..with a thinner lighter collar and a new lighweight fabric.



And Ouano has lightweight competition gi, which I have (Thanks to MMAOutlet!) and will be reviewing any day now... so really, if you are thinking about getting a new lightweight competition gi, there are tons of options and MMAOutlet has some great deals. For example, $60 for a Vulkan Pro Light!!!

I had a busy weekend, working for NAGA at their Texas Grappling Championship, and I have some deadlines to follow up on at the office. But I can take a few minutes this morning before leaving for work to fill you all in.

Working at NAGA (as scorer) is unlike working at an IBJJF tourney. At IBJJF, it's very regimented in terms of your job duties-- you keep score and time, period. You get paid $80/day, period. At NAGA, you have to do more, but you make more ($150/day), and you have a lot more interaction with the coaches, parents, etc. So it's a nice change of pace.

As scorer this weekend, I was responsible for bracketing all the divisions on my mat as well as scoring, timekeeping, and getting the medals, belts, and swords together for awards and pictures. NAGA does a great job of organizing so that you know from the beginning which divisions will be on your mat. You begin with getting the man with the microphone (sometimes Kip Kollar, president of NAGA, and sometimes Kerik (sp?) or one of the other administrators) to call your division. People come to the mat and hand you their business-card-sized division cards. Yellow for nogi, blue for gi, and they have the competitor's name, age, weight, gender, school, and division written down. You need to watch that the weight is written in the color ink they used at weigh-ins (to prevent fudging though I know no one would ever do that.) The nogi divisions are divided into novice (under 6 months' experience), beginner (<1 yr), intermediate (<2 yrs) and expert (>4 yrs). Gi is divided by belt color except there are whitebelt novices and whitebelt beginners.

How does bracketing happen? You try to look at everyone's ages and weights and pair people appropriately. The ages matter much more in children's divisions (there's a lot of maturing that goes on between 8 and 10, for example) whereas in adults, it's weight that is more important. You'll try to match people with someone as close to their own weight as possible, giving the bye to the lightest person especially if there's a substantial spread in weights, but you also need to avoid people from the same school hitting each other till unavoidable (so putting them on the other side of the bracket entirely.) NAGA has 3 ring binders at each table with bracketing-for-idiots forms, so whether you have 3 or 15 competitors in a division, you can pretty much just follow the numbers to do it right.

Missed out on staying with my friend Triin on Saturday night because I neglected to tell her I was having dinner with teammates in Dallas FIRST, so her directions (assuming I was coming straight from the tournament in Ft. Worth) were great but my lack of communication fouled us up. I ended up staying at the same hotel my teammates were at. Boo! But sounds like we'll see each other again soon, at Girls in Gis this summer AND ... (drum roll) maybe we'll be putting together a women-only tournament this fall!! Woo! Will keep you up to date, I promise.