Gracie Barra San Clemente

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Gracie Barra hosts its first championship in the United States, and teaches how to make use of the homegrown assets to run a business

Flavio “Cachorrinho” Almeida and Marcos “Piu Piu” Joca have trained at Gracie Barra since learning their first Jiu-Jitsu moves. Beyond being black belts and teachers, they serve executive roles in the ranks of the company, which stands out for its corporate direction in the realm of Jiu-Jitsu, with its branches standardized and integrated across the planet.Both are behind the idea of the Gracie Barra Competition Network (www.gbcompnet.com), which has a virtual community along the lines of Facebook.com and hosts its first championship this Saturday, October 25th, in Irvine, California.The secret to reconciling so many activities successfully, according to Cachorrinho, “is to have good heads thinking together and with the well defined direction of our master [Carlos Gracie Jr.].” For Piu-Piu, that is made easy when you are doing something you love: “We’re GB 24/7.”On the eve of GBCN first competition, GRACIEMAG.com held the following interview with the two:

Marco Joca quotes Confucius: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” 1) Today there are hundreds of academies spread across the planet. I understand that the relationship between professors is a direct one. But is it possible, through a virtual community, to also bring Gracie Barra’s Jiu-Jitsu practitioners from different places together?Flavio Almeida: This community of GB students already exists and came about spontaneously by way of social networking sites like myspace and orkut. Gracie Barra is a global community of Jiu-Jitsu practitioners and GBCN will further strengthen the relationship between us all, not just by creating an exclusive global community, but also for having in the championships a place of gathering.Marcos Joca: Within Gracie Barra there is very strong family spirit that is present in all the schools, and the students feel a part of a great group even if they don’t personally know all its members. This union is a result of master Carlos Gracie Junior’s vision and was passed on directly and indirectly to all GB schools. We are just using technological advances to strengthen this process.

2) A small percentage of practitioners compete. Is this community not destined to connect this percentage?Flavio: The GBCN will bolster this percentage. Our championships will become can’t-miss events on the calendar of all Gracie Barra Jiu-Jitsu practitioners and, for providing a family and friendly environment that is also competitive, it will bring more people to explore the competitive side of sport Jiu-Jitsu as a way of refining their evolution in the sport.Joca: These days there is a large percentage of practitioners who don’t compete for several reasons and one of the aims of the GBCN is to draw more students to the competitive environment in a healthy and progressive manner. The members of the virtual community will share memories and experiences relating to Jiu-Jitsu as a whole and also the GBCN championships. At this early stage we are focusing on the students with less experience, as a sort of “minor league” with the idea of preparing them for the big IBJJF events.3) What kind of numbers are you hoping for this first year of the GB network?Joca: The goal is to attract students who were never interested in competing. It doesn’t matter if the number is 1 or 10,000 since the focus is on helping the growth of BJJ and educating its practitioners. But its worth remember that in Southeastern California alone GB has 3,000 students – a number still very small when compared to Jiu-Jitsu’s potential in the United States. There are so many benefits to the art that GB wants to bring BJJ to the greatest number of practitioners possible. As Flavio said in an online interview – in the near future GB will have a school in every city of America!4) For its history of having unquestionable titles in traditional competitions, was taking 3rd at the 2008 Worlds less than what was hoped for?Flavio: Not at all. Jiu-Jitsu is becoming more and more competitive and the main teams alternating places in competition will be a constant. In the long term, those teams that lay a solid foundation and go through a serious process of organization and structuring will come out victorious. I have no doubt GB will remain at the top of sport Jiu-Jitsu in the future.Joca: It depends on your point of view. Currently GB is in a transitional phase whereby we are investing a lot of time in expansion and structuring projects that in the mid and long term will yield a global competition team unlike any before seen.5) How can the GB Competition Networks help reinforce the GB competition team?Flavio: The GBCN competitions are a larger-scale version of the traditional internal GB elimination tournaments, and our athletes will be able to prepare better “at home.” There is less pressure and the athletes will have greater peace of mind to let there games flow. And it’s also a question of math: more students will become interested in competing; soon more talent will be discovered.Joca: At purple belt, I recall having fought more times in the internal selection trial than in the world championship I won a gold medal at! It was really hard to win the qualifiers, but the champions knew that, having passed the internal GB qualifiers, it meant they were 80% of the way to winning titles in big events. The GBCN will make it possible to recreate these historic qualifiers, but with a lot more structure and professionalism.