When most people hear “martial arts,” usually the first things that come to mind are training, self defense and fighting. Also, probably something along the line of bros, and maybe yellowed classrooms, smelly changing rooms and people who are a little too into Kung Fu movies (no shame.)
These initial thoughts, however, likely don’t include community, yet martial arts like BJJ and Muay Thai naturally lend themselves to this. If you train in an academy for any real time, you’re most likely going to end up having most of your best friends training with you. This has become the heartbeat of our entire organization.
The camaraderie forged on the mats comes from all the ways you struggle together in the trenches, help each other get better and watch each other grow. Martial arts are fun and fulfilling, but they’re also very physically and mentally hard.
Even your best friends are trying to choke, tap, kick, or punch you as part of the training. Add in fatigue and inevitable injuries, and what you have to admit is, a lot of what we do involves suffering – and there’s something unique about sharing that suffering with others that forms tight bonds very quickly.
Because of this shared experience, people around you become very invested in your successes (or failures). When someone gets injured, everyone feels sad about it. When someone wins a big tournament, it feels like everyone who suffered with them gets to feel that win as well.
For this reason, we put a lot into making our community an inclusive and safe space for people to train and connect. The culture we foster on the mats extends to how we operate behind the desk as well, and since most of our admin staff also train as well, it creates a network of understanding and camaraderie.
Walk into any academy anywhere, and you’ll probably find aspects of community that exist there. What makes us at Easton different is how we work to intentionally curate that community through the way we structure classes, do promotions and hold events.
Keep reading to see what we do to ensure everyone feels supported, welcome and excited to be here!
A space that fosters belonging
Combating every stereotype the 80s and 90s may have given martial arts, our academies are clean, bright and always smell fresh. Our awesome front desk staff make sure of it – just like they ensure the bathrooms are always neat, fully stocked and the laundry gets done.
Why does this matter so much? Creating a place people want to commune means first and foremost making it a positive experience on every level. We put a lot into making sure our front desk staff are friendly, helpful and engaging. That’s why we call them First Impressions Specialists!
Before you even decide you want to stay and train or make new friends on the mat, we want you to feel welcomed and seen. In this way, we grow our community from the inside out. We take care of you, and you take care of each other.
You spend a lot of time with each other on the mats, which also means it’s critical to be a good partner. You can do kickboxing as fitness for a while, but even then you often share a bag and do some partner work in the burn-out rounds at the end.
Part of the idea includes wanting you to learn how to operate in harmony with others – how to be a solid human both on and off the mats. We especially emphasize this in our kids’ classes – what being a black belt partner means: looking out for each other, taking care of each other and helping each other grow.
[Amal Easton: The Seed That Sprouted A Community]
In our adult classes, we structure the curriculum so that there are always more experienced people in class with beginners. While we have Fundamentals, Intermediate and Advanced classes, each group has a range of skills intentionally designed to reach a certain level of proficiency before getting promoted to the next stage of training.
At the start of class, everyone lines up and peels down from top to bottom to pair up with a training partner, meaning that the highest ranking and most experienced practitioners get paired with the rookies. This system is foundational to our culture (and core value) of stewardship – bringing others up in both confidence and skill.
While at other academies, you may often find that upper belts only work with other upper belts, leaving the newer students to fend for themselves, at Easton we make sure that higher belts understand their responsibility to pass on their knowledge.
At the end of class, when it’s time to roll live or spar and people get to pick their training partners, often upper belts will still opt to train with some lower belts who they’ve developed friendships with, thus continuing to teach and support them on their training journey.
With these values at the forefront of our culture, it only makes sense that the classroom becomes a fertile ground for friendship, camaraderie and a deep sense of community. The people you train with become the people you show up for.
[How Martial Arts Changed My Life: Confidence + Community]
Building and maintaining a community
Michael Phipps, along with being our Marketing Director, is Easton’s resident videographer. He’s behind the lens of all our events, belt promotions and tournaments. It also so happens that Phipps did his graduate thesis at CU on Community. We’re not surprised that he’s landed with us.
Last year, on one of our Easton Community Podcasts, host Mike Tousignant directed a question to Phipps: What makes a successful community?
“The community is a living thing,” Phipps said, “bigger than one person. People come and go but something or someone has to keep the community going.”
We’re not in a built-in community environment like a neighborhood or nuclear family, he pointed out. It’s a business and you pay to be there. Yet, this becomes the place your best friends are.
In many ways, the Easton community is similar to another education-focused community, college. People shift within and acquire different roles, and this shapes the academy each time.
Each coach and class has its own show, a unique flavor and approach. This often leads to the forming of subcultures, and these little subcultures develop into their own biomes.
[Winter 2024 Easton Zine, Vol. 2: The People Edition]
Though we do our best with event videography and monthly photography at the academies, it’s hard to capture community. It’s always shifting, with so many moving pieces and people holding it together, from coaches to students and staff behind the scenes running the business.
People also leave, and this can happen for a variety of reasons. When a leader who has planted roots departs, it can cause a disturbance and it takes time and effort to rebuild and adapt.
Sometimes people have to part ways for the best of the community, and not every community works for everyone. Going hand-in-hand with extreme ownership, our place in the community is that of the community structure.
As the school, the hub for learning and connection, we must take our individual egos out of the equation and become the platform for the growth that you as the students bring. We provide the stage and the program, but you make the show. You determine if we have a cast, an audience, and a storyline. Ultimately, you determine our success.
To answer Mike’s question, Phipps concluded that a strong community is “a group of people that rely on each other for success and growth – those people who help get you towards your goals.”
[A Family That Trains Together Slays Together, Pt 1]
Events and more
Along with the community fostered in the training room, we also prioritize events that help bring the whole team together – including events that bring all nine of our schools under one roof.
Events like academy-wide belt promotions, randoris – including women’s and teens – sparring days, seminars with visiting guest instructors and competitions like the Easton Open which we host twice a year. We also have academy-localized Ninja Nights for the kids, socials for the adults and occasionally get discounts for local fights which we invite the entire community to!
All of these are designed to get you together with people you may not normally see in class and connect over a shared love for martial arts.
Knowing that you and your classmates, no matter where you come from, your age or occupation, share the same growth mindset as you makes it easier to have a solid baseline of connection. And having a built in foundation of trust from working together in class helps you feel comfortable knowing that if they take care of you on the mats, they likely will off the mats as well.
Some of our favorite community events over the years have included:
We love these events because along with uniting all the academies as one Easton, they provide a valuable stepping stone to other competitions like state tournaments, where you’re up against a bunch of people you don’t know from other schools.
Unlike those tournaments, the Easton Open takes place in a controlled environment, competing against others from Easton’s nine schools. You may not know your opponents personally, but you know they’ve been raised by the same curriculum, bar of standards and code of conduct as you.
A martial arts practice, like any other, requires consistency to grow. Without consistency, we can’t progress to the next stage – smoother rolls, cleaner punches, or that exciting moment when you earn a new belt. Leveling up at Easton Training Center looks a lot like any other commitment you make to yourself.
You show up, put in the work, and eventually that work speaks for itself. Our belt promotion ceremonies usually see over 100 people on the mats and bring all of the academies together to celebrate your progress!
In 2024, Easton student Vesper Ortega was invited to compete at the ADCC World Championship! Vesper was one of few youth Jiu Jitsu grapplers invited to this exclusive event, and Easton held a seminar taught by Ms. Vesper herself to raise funds for her trip.
Costs were donation-based starting at $15 so that as many people had the opportunity to attend as possible. All the proceeds went towards helping Vesper travel to ADCC and her fight for her dream!
In May of 2022, Easton Training Center hosted a workshop focused on breathing and getting exposed to the cold. Fifty students from all the academies came to participate, and we had a lot of fun.
Professor Miles Lukas, a black belt under Dave Camarillo and a certified Wim Hof instructor, has worked with Rickson Gracie on ways to breathe better for Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. He spent the weekend teaching us how to use our breath and mind for better performance.
Each Easton Training Center academy puts up a Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving, on which we hang paper cut outs of ornaments with a gift idea and the corresponding estimated price for that gift. Students and staff can choose a gift that they’re able to afford, and they bring it in (unwrapped) to the front desk. On December 23rd, all of the gifts are delivered to Children’s Hospital!
Moments like these are what ultimately stick with us the most and inspire us to continue those experiences into our adulthood, bringing countless others in until the effort is so vast that nobody really knows how it began — nor does it matter.
Easton held its first ever Muay Thai sparring and shirt promotion event in May 2024. With over 150 students on the mats, it was amazing to see how much the Muay Thai program has grown throughout the Easton Training Center schools in the past decade.
On May 25, 2024, Easton Training Center held its very first Teen Randori. Inviting teens from all the Easton Jiu Jitsu programs, we had an amazing turnout for the first edition of these events.
With plenty of training partners on the mats as well as coaches training with the students, we had an hour of sweaty Jiu Jitsu fun. This first event was such a success that we will be holding regular Teen randoris, alternating the host school each time.
On Saturday, June 15, 2024, Easton Tigers Muay Thai hosted a sparring day at ETC Boulder! The event, open to kids aged 7 and up with a Yellow Belt or coach approval, brought dozens of students to the mats from all eight of our academies.
Holding all-Easton, communal events like this for adults and kids is a huge part of remaining in alignment with one another as one Team Easton. Our kids never cease to amaze us with their dedication and spirit!
The first All-Easton Women’s BJJ Randori happened on August 3, , and we couldn’t be more happy with the turnout. Easton Littleton looked incredible with its amazing new space, and every school had students on the mats.
As an academy, we learned a ton from this event and the next one will be even better! We’d like to give a huge shout out to Professor Nick and Coach Jen and all the Littleton crew for facilitating the space, and shout out to Professor Beth Huddleston! We can’t wait for the next one.
Women’s sparring days allow us to bring women from all of our academies together on one mat to test their skills and meet new friends in a supportive, female-only environment!
Professor Jon Thomas, a BJJ Black Belt, 2x IBJJF World Champion and 3x IBJJF Pan Champion taught an exclusive 3-hour seminar in the gi at Easton Denver on Sunday, February 25, 2024.
Our Denver academy filled with a whopping 97 of you in attendance, from 2-stripe white belts to black belts! Jon’s philosophy comes down to honing the cerebral aspects of Jiu Jitsu as rigorously as the physical, tapping into pattern-recognition and the ability to make good choices at the right moment.
The benefits of community
Community, especially in the martial arts world offers plenty of benefits but the biggest we’ve seen has been motivation and connection. More people tend to stick around when they make friends, and we also credit that to the built in accountability you develop when training with others.
Not all martial arts schools are created equally, but all of ours prioritize a strong foundation of community for these reasons:
Accountability
A community fosters accountability by encouraging consistency and commitment to showing up. When you’re part of a community, you know others are counting on you, which makes it easier to stay disciplined and keep moving forward.
Understanding
It also fosters empathy and mutual respect among peers. Through shared experiences, community members learn to see the world from others’ perspectives, building stronger bonds.
Progress
Helping each other grow and improve together is crucial. Progress is amplified in a group where everyone celebrates wins and supports each other through setbacks.
[Back To The Mat: Overcoming Fear With Community]
Support
Everyone needs encouragement through challenges and setbacks. A community provides a safety net, reminding you that you’re never facing obstacles alone.
Connection
Building meaningful relationships that extend into everyday life is not always easy after graduation. The friendships formed in a supportive environment, such as on the mats, often become lifelong connections.
Motivation
Being part of a community inspires you to push limits and strive for excellence. Seeing others work hard and succeed drives you to aim higher and believe in your own potential.
Collaboration
Learning to work together to achieve common goals is a critical part of life. In a community, shared efforts often lead to greater accomplishments than individual endeavors.
Resilience
Working together, you can develop strength through shared struggles and successes. Overcoming challenges together creates a collective toughness that’s hard to replicate alone.
Inspiration
A community allows you to draw energy and ideas from diverse perspectives. Communities thrive on variety, and the different backgrounds and insights fuel creativity and growth.
Belonging
Creating a space where everyone feels welcome and valued is our goal. When people feel they belong, they’re more likely to invest their time, energy, and heart into the group.
Become a part of our community
If you’re looking for some ways to get deeper into the network here at Easton alongside your membership, here are some ideas!
- Volunteer for events like the Easton Open. These huge events take a lot of hands, and we’re always looking for people to help!
- If you’re a parent or have kids who train at Easton, volunteer to help out with your academy’s Ninja Nights, Halloween parties or community socials like barbecues.
- Write for the Easton blog! We’re always looking for voices from the community, and it’s a paid opportunity. Email your GM for more information!
- Rep Easton out in the wild with our unique gear, including t-shirts, hoodies and joggers, and other merch like water bottles and stickers!
A Family Together: From Primitive Skills to Martial Arts ft. Gelsey Malferrari and Neal Ritter
