Humphrey Hall has a reputation for housing Marquette’s top athletes, but tucked deep inside its winding hallways is a room most students never see, almost acting as a secret fight club.
Four nights a week, the university’s Brazilian jiu-jitsu club rolls out black mats and transforms that space into a training ground, where they learn the art of jiu-jitsu, a unique martial art that focuses on grappling and leverage. It originated from Japanese samurai traditions and was later developed in Brazil into both a form of self-defense and a competitive sport.
The club practices every Sunday from 2-3:30 p.m. and on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday from 7:30-9:30 p.m. Coach Chris Martin, a 2001 Marquette graduate, is usually the first to arrive and has had no shortage of experience to bring to the students in the club.
“I started doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu back in 2008, and I’ve been teaching beginners since 2010,” Martin said. “When I came back to Marquette in 2017, I wanted to build a program that made this sport accessible to everyone, not just experienced athletes.”
Jiu-jitsu is a sport that relies on practice above all else. Students can come in with no experience, roll on the mat with black belts, and [they] always learn — something that many other sports can’t offer.
“What’s unique about this club is that everybody who starts is a beginner. Most people who come in don’t have experience, so they’re able to learn together,” Martin said. “The learning curve is a lot faster here because students are learning things together and helping each other improve.”
One student who began jiu-jitsu at Marquette is club president Ian Hansen.
“I had wrestled a few years, and some friends kept pushing me to try it,” Hansen, a junior in the College of Health Sciences said. “At first, I went inconsistently. But once I found out Marquette had a club, it was really accessible, and that’s when I started spending a lot more time on the mats.”
Through Martin’s connections, including the Nova gyms in the Milwaukee area he founded, Marquette students get the unique experience to scrimmage other gyms and learn from practitioners outside the program.
“We do scrimmages a lot of the time with some of the local MMA gyms and schools,” Martin said. “Everybody supports the Marquette program because they want the students to continue training and improve, even after they graduate.”
Partly thanks to the UFC, its new promotion UFC BJJ (Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu) and other grappling competitions, jiu-jitsu has skyrocketed in popularity among young people. Popular UFC fighters like Khabib Nurmagomedov, Charles Oliveira, and Islam Makhachev have utilized BJJ to become champions and inspire millions around the world. Jiu-jitsu is now the fastest-growing martial art, with an estimated six million practitioners worldwide according to the UFC.
But its growth isn’t just due to physical benefits. Training in jiu-jitsu is also considered highly beneficial for mental health, especially for busy Marquette students.
“Sometimes you’re going to feel too tired to come to training, but don’t look at it just as exercise, think about it for your mental health,” Martin said. “When you leave, you feel so much better, and it also gives you a social outlet to meet friends and be part of a supportive group.”
Martin points to the COVID-19 lockdown as a time when many kids were stuck isolated, and he says BJJ quickly gained popularity afterward due to the healthy connections it offered.
“The real reason I believe that trend is because they were the COVID-19 generation,” Martin said. “When the shutdowns happened, people couldn’t really watch sports, but the two sports that were on were either wrestling or jiu-jitsu. Kids were home, and they were exposed to jiu-jitsu more because of that than when I started a long time ago.”
The current Marquette student body experienced COVID-19 lockdowns during high school and middle school, formative years for socializing and stepping out of their comfort zones. Jiu-jitsu offers a healthy and engaging way for students to meet lifelong friends and develop a valuable skill.
“It’s really fun to watch people progress and truly be interested in the sport,” Hansen said. “It makes me really happy when I see tons of people still coming in months into the semester, spending two hours with us that they don’t have to spend.”
This story was written by Conor McPherson. He can be reached at conor.mcpherson@marquette.edu or on Twitter/X @ConorMcPherson_.