Fighter, Trainer, Business Person: One person, three perspectives on MMA in Canada

An Interview with Sarah Kaufman, HCF Women’s Bantamweight Champion

There are few people more qualified to discuss the state of mixed martial arts in Canada than Sarah Kaufman. You probably haven’t heard of Sarah. That’s not surprising considering that women’s professional MMA remains well behind men’s MMA in terms of public recognition and participation, and that she trains in Victoria, British Columbia, about as far from the bright lights of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, or even Montreal as is possible without leaving the continent. But even if her name is not yet known in every household, Sarah is as hooked into both the professional and grassroots aspects of mixed martial arts as anyone. On one hand, Sarah is the Hardcore Championship Fighting (HCF) Women’s Bantamweight Champion; on the other, she is both a trainer and administrator of Zugec Ultimate Martial Arts (ZUMA) in Victoria. Talking to Sarah, it quickly becomes clear that MMA is her passion as well as her occupation; so, when I wanted to ask an expert about the state of MMA in Canada, Sarah was clearly the go-to person. It is rare to find someone whose views on MMA are shaped by personal experience in three separate facets of the MMA business, as Sarah’s clearly are.

We sit down for an informal interview in the office shared by Sarah and Adam Zugec – the owner of ZUMA, and an accomplished combat submission wrestler – as well as by Adam’s companion, a French bulldog who sometimes seems to be the highest authority in the gym. Sarah sits on the opposite side of the desk from me, still wearing her workout gear, soaked from an intense hour of jiu jitsu training, which seems completely at odds with her explanation of how she got started in MMA.

“I started in dance,” she says.

Dance? I wait for the punch line, but it never comes. She’s dead serious: Sarah trained in dance from the age of two, and got into MMA almost by accident when Adam opened a gym below her dance studio. A friend from the studio decided to try out the kickboxing class at the gym and asked if Sarah would go with her.

“She never actually went,” Sarah says with an ironic grin, “but I did, and I was hooked.”

That’s how, at age seventeen and having never before seen an amateur or professional fight, Sarah Kaufman started training. For ten months, it was once per week; at that point, Sarah decided that this was something that she wanted to make central to her life and started training almost every day. After another six months, she began training in grappling. By age nineteen, around eighteen months after she started training, she had given up dance entirely and began entering a variety of MMA competitions. A few years further on, and Sarah has a perfect 6-0 record in professional fights, has won all her fights by either knockout or TKO, and claimed the HCF belt with a one-sided domination of Josh Barnett-trained Ginele Marquez in October, 2007. Along the way, Sarah has also helped Adam build ZUMA into a very busy gym (at times, the walls sweat from so many people training together) as the “general overseer” of the business, and worked on a Bachelor of Science from the University of Victoria. Oh, and she teaches the women’s kickboxing classes, the children’s classes, and is usually around lending a helping hand in Adam’s MMA and jiu jitsu classes. Balancing her training, instruction and business duties “can get a little tough”, she admits.

“Some days you just think, ‘Why am I doing this?’ But you just get through it because it’s what you want to do more than anything else.”

Because MMA is such a significant part of Sarah’s life, I figure that she will have some strong opinions on the emerging MMA scene, and I’m not disappointed; after speaking with her for just a few minutes, it is apparent that she’s not only intelligent, but that she gives MMA issues a great deal of careful thought. I want to know if the rise in the popularity of MMA is because of the major promotions, as we so often hear from the proprietors of the UFC and other big players, or if the rise in popularity of the sport corresponds with a more grassroots growth in support and awareness. As a business person, her take is that ZUMA has grown over the past few years but not in direct correlation to the popularity of televised MMA. She sees that the number of people training has slowly but steadily increased independent of what has happened in the mass media, but more importantly, she notes that the type of people who commit to training at ZUMA tells a story about popular perception and awareness of MMA. Sarah tells me that there are two types of people who make up the majority of ZUMA’s clients: “There are people who are aware of competitive fighting and it interests them, although most of them don’t actually want to fight themselves; and then there are people who just want a really great workout, want to push themselves.” Few people actually walk through ZUMA’s doors hoping to follow in the footsteps of their favourite fighter, and of the new clients who do seem to be relatively recent converts to MMA, few stick around after finding out exactly how demanding the training can be.

“There are lots of people who talk like they would fight, but they never come down and train.” There’s no judgement in Sarah’s tone; to her, everyone decides for him or herself how they want to be involved in MMA, and for most of those who train, they would have gravitated towards a place like ZUMA regardless of the success of the MMA entertainment industry. Sarah also believes that MMA will always be around, regardless of the success of the entertainment side; while MMA may have “capped” in terms of public consciousness, ZUMA and other MMA gyms are a completely different kind of business, appealing to a completely different public demand.

I’m curious, though: haven’t more gyms opened up to try and capitalize on the MMA boom, actively going after the crowd that is just learning about MMA through television? Does this added competition affect an independent gym like ZUMA in the business sense? Sarah immediately and flatly declares, “No.”

“There’s just not a ton of direct competition for clients,” she explains. “Each place offers a specific niche environment, so we all cater to different types of people.” She goes on to explain ZUMA’s philosophy: to provide high-quality, professional training, which is open and accessible to the average person, in a friendly, non-intimidating environment. That sounds like a tall order to me; just by the law of averages, I expect some bullies, macho-men, or outright sadists have walked through the doors. Sarah openly admits that this is true, but that’s why she and Adam give trial runs to everyone who wants to join: while the potential client is testing out the gym, the gym is also testing out the client. And Sarah does not flinch from admitting that people have been asked to leave, both beginners and those who have been around longer. Sarah is clear that everyone should be allowed to train MMA, but that for some people, that training will have to be somewhere else. She sums up the ZUMA attitude simply: “If you’re a nice person, you can train here; you just need a positive attitude, and you have to want to learn.”

I shift gears a bit, asking her what motivates her to stay and train with ZUMA; as a professional fighter, Adam is her coach, and the people at ZUMA are her team. Has she ever felt pulled to move to a “name” organization, like Team Quest or one of the several Xtreme Couture gyms that have opened in other cities? Does being in a small city like Victoria limit her? Her response is two-fold. First, Sarah made the decision to stay in Victoria permanently based partly on what ZUMA is: “a community of really great people who want to train and learn and don’t want to kill each other.” In both her business and professional fighter roles, this appeals to her, and it’s the same reason why she doesn’t see ZUMA going the route of some gyms and opening other branches: it is the people that make ZUMA. But she is also adamant that the quality of coaching she gets from Adam is second-to-none. She seems irked that some people dismiss Adam as a quality coach because he’s based in a small city on Vancouver Island; she is quick to note that Adam has trained with world class people – she names Erik Paulson and Marcus Soares among others – who all vouch for his skill. And more, Sarah tells me that as a professional fighter, coaches cannot be judged on their credentials alone.

“Some people are great at MMA, but don’t know how to coach. Adam can do both.” That factors into why the majority of ZUMA clients are word-of-mouth referrals: anyone who sticks around for a while is struck by the quality of the training, and Sarah indicates that the benefit is equal for the average person or for a committed professional fighter like herself. “We don’t necessarily have the name recognition,” she says with a shrug, “but we have a great team that produces great fighters and skilled athletes.” She adds that there is an incredible loyalty among ZUMA’s clients, which explains why she isn’t threatened by new gyms opening, even those that do have name recognition; she won’t train anywhere else, and she doubts that many of ZUMA’s non-professional clients would either. Sarah also notes that Adam and ZUMA are both “well networked”: people in the MMA industry know who they are, even if the average person on the street does not, which helps to explain how ZUMA is able to attract top-flight international talent to run seminars, like Leonardo Santos who spent two days teaching at ZUMA less than a week after I sat down with Sarah. Sarah’s message is a positive endorsement of the hundreds of small MMA gyms across Canada, from Victoria to Thunder Bay to St. John’s: build around quality and principle, and people will come regardless of the name.

But all is not rosy in the Canadian MMA scene, and I am anxious to hear what Sarah thinks of some ongoing controversies. I start by asking her about an issue that is close-to-home, literally and figuratively: the professional MMA “ban” (or deregulation) in Vancouver.

“It’s kind of funny, really,” she says without even the hint of a smile. “Vancouver was one of the first places to have MMA events in Canada, and now it’s banned. And it just makes no sense. They [the Vancouver Athletic Commission] say it’s for health reasons, but you have rugby, football, and boxing; they’re all allowed, so MMA should be, because in terms of major injuries, MMA is safer than all of those.” Sarah believes that professional MMA will return to Vancouver, but in the mean time, she is worried that the sport is getting openly run down by political people who have more of a platform to speak to the public than people like herself. “People talking badly about the sport will put a dent in peoples’ impressions of mixed martial arts.” She feels that misinformation and ignorance are at the root of the controversy, but because only one side really gets airtime, the misinformation only worsens the longer the ban drags on.

Sarah also worries about the way that MMA has been forced underground by the ban. She discusses how professional cards are now being held on small Indian reserves – exempt from provincial regulatory bodies – where a lack of infrastructure is a serious problem. The host venues usually do not have the resources or know-how to conduct proper medical testing, and only small promoters who are “just trying to throw on a card” will take the risk of working in these locations. The result is a complete mess: no standardization of procedures to protect fighters, and often terrible mismatches in experience between fighters (either intentionally for the “KO factor”, or because there are just so few professional fighters available). “This is where people get hurt”, she says, shaking her head.

But Sarah also believes that these promotions will continue, despite the risks, for several reasons. Yes, there are promoters trying to “catch on to the wave” of MMA – Sarah predicts these organizations will be “moderately successful, but long term, it will be people who put in time before it was popular who will be the foundation” of professional MMA – but there are also young fighters just looking for some experience. “There isn’t amateur MMA the way that there is amateur boxing,” Sarah says, “and if you watch skilled fighters, you realize that they have to have a huge variety of technical expertise. Young fighters need places to work on their skills.” But the present trade-off, she notes with frustration, is that they often get mismatches that hurt more than help. Sarah thinks an amateur scene would be a big boon for MMA in British Columbia, and Canada generally. In the meantime, she and the other trainers at ZUMA encourage aspiring fighters to compete in amateur jiu jitsu and Pancration tournaments; it’s not the same, but it’s better than either nothing at all, or getting destroyed thanks to shady matchmaking.

I return to the idea of “catching the wave” of MMA one more time. We have talked about how the rise in popular awareness of MMA has (or has not) affected the business of training, as well as the impact for fighters, but what about the non-physical side of things? There are new ‘MMA clothing’ companies cropping up almost by the second, leading to some strange developments socially (such as the Vancouver night club ban on wearing MMA gear). Closer to home, Victoria, a relatively small city with a large number of senior citizens (not the usual MMA-watching demographic) supports two dedicated MMA clothing shops. I’m curious what Sarah sees in store for these ‘peripheral MMA industries’. While Sarah smiles frequently, she rarely laughs, but she does when I ask this question. “The ‘peripheral industry’, as you called it, will last as long as MMA is on television. But people who wear MMA gear like that rarely actually train.” I’m tempted to object, as someone who both trains and owns several pieces of name-brand MMA clothing, but as I think about it, I rarely see anyone else around the gym wearing it, and I realize that, maybe unconsciously, I have been reluctant to wear my gear to the gym. A little off-balance, I ask Sarah to tell me why she thinks it is that the gear is more popular among those who don’t train than those who do.

Her response is simple: “Some people like to try and prove that they’re tough, or they’re fighters; people who train don’t need to broadcast that, because they know what they’re capable of.” Fair enough.

I ask Sarah if she could do a little crystal ball gazing and tell me what she sees in the future of MMA. She says that she hopes MMA becomes a sport akin to soccer in the public consciousness: people training to get in shape, to learn skills, and to compete in jiu jitsu and other types of amateur tournaments, but not necessarily with the intent to be professional fighters; “I’d like MMA to be for everybody.” While MMA may not be “for everybody” yet, she sees that the foundations have been laid. “There’s going to be more, smaller promotions that come and go, but the main promotions that we have now, that have put in the time, they will stay and grow.” So, Sarah sees there always being a place for people like her to make a living in the industry that she loves, either fighting or training, or both as she herself does. I have a prediction of my own: while you may not have heard of Sarah Kaufman yet, if MMA continues to grow as she hopes it will, then it’s only a matter of time. As a fighter, trainer and business person – and with growing success in all three areas – Sarah herself is quickly becoming part of the foundation of MMA in Canada.

Sarah’s next fights are March 29 – a title defence against Molly Helsel (5-6-1 overall; 2-0 in last 2) on the “Crow’s Nest” HCF card – and May 10, opponent TBD, also with the HCF.