From a Mat in the Park to Amsterdam's Carlson Gracie Academy
The first jiu-jitsu academy in Amsterdam didn't have a roof. It didn't have walls, or a front desk, or a bank of lockers. It had a piece of mat, a stretch of park grass, and a few homesick Brazilians who missed the feeling of a good roll.
I started jiu-jitsu in the park. I take a piece of mat like this and put it in the park. And we train, the Brazilians train together. One guy brings a beer, the other guy the sounds. And you train.
That's Marcos "Flexa" Neves Mello, describing the summer of 2002. Twenty-five years later, he runs Carlson Gracie Amsterdam—a 150-square-meter academy in the west of the city.
He carried one of the most storied names in Brazilian jiu-jitsu across an ocean and into a country that, when he arrived, had never seen the sport.
The distance between that deck in the park and this room full of mats is the whole story. And it's longer than it looks.
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The Boy Who Slept on the Mat
Marcos grew up in Copacabana, the Rio de Janeiro neighborhood where the beach and the city press right up against each other. He found jiu-jitsu at 14, when an aunt—already a blue belt—brought him to the Carlson Gracie Academy and introduced him to the man himself.
Carlson Gracie took one look at the kid and put him on the mat. Gave him gear. Never charged him a cent.
For Marcos, that generosity became a debt he's still repaying in the way he runs his own gym.
There was a stretch when he had nowhere else to go, so he simply stayed.
I live inside the Carlson Gracie academy. I sleep more than one year on the mat. Wake up, clean the mat. Carlson Gracie comes six o'clock in the morning. I was there.
He became Carlson's assistant, learning not just how to fight but how to teach—how to run a room, motivate a beginner, pull a shy student to the center and hand them a technique. When he talks about Carlson, the register shifts from coach to family.
He was really my father. He was my father. He catch me—and my father—not only for me, for a lot of guys. A lot of guys.
Nine Years a Blue Belt
If you think promotions are slow at your gym, consider Marcos's path.
He spent roughly nine years as a blue belt—not because he wasn't good, but because the math wouldn't move.
I still around nine years in the blue belt. Because to pass me from blue to purple, you have to take the guy from purple and pass him to brown, and the guy from brown to black, and the black belt out. The schedule was full. It was impossible.
The Carlson Gracie team was stacked, and belts moved like a line at the bank—nobody advanced until the person ahead of them did.
Marcos was a super-heavyweight, and every slot in his category was taken.
He kept competing anyway.
In 1996 he placed second in the world at purple belt, before chronic back injuries forced him out of competition.
The black belt came in 1997, promoted by Carlson himself at one of the last big ceremonies the academy would hold.
Two years after that, Marcos flew to Germany to teach seminars—among the first Carlson Gracie black belts to do it there—and started making the long drive to Amsterdam whenever he could.
He fell for the city.
Then he went home to Rio, worked private classes and a security job to save money, and decided to start his life over in a place where he knew almost no one.
Surviving Amsterdam
Nobody warns you how quiet a new country can be when you don't speak the language.
The life here was tough. Tough. Tough. Because I come, I don't speak any English. I just come. One friend invite me to come, have a room for me to sleep for two weeks. And that's it.
Two weeks in a borrowed room, no English, and a plan that amounted to stay.
He cleaned restaurant kitchens to survive, and because he was in the kitchen anyway, he started learning to cook—desserts, salads, working his way up until he was an independent cook handling a full house on his own.
It kept the lights on. But it was never the thing. The thing was always jiu-jitsu, waiting for the summer, waiting for the park.
From a Park Deck to 150 Square Meters
The build was slow in the way that real things are slow. The park sessions led to a favor: some Brazilian friends from the capoeira scene offered him floor time twice a week.
That led to a bigger venue, then to a university sports center—"big place, but little money"—and finally to the decision to open a gym that was actually his.
His first real home was small. Very small.
The other location, I stayed for 12 years. Very small place—like 80 square meters. Now we have a big space. This is 150 square meters. Two showers outside, more toilets, nice ventilation, very nice light. Now it's completely changed.
Twelve years in 80 square meters.
That's the part of gym ownership nobody posts about—the long cramped middle, the slow accrual of students who keep coming back because the teacher is worth the tight quarters.
The current space sits inside a government neighborhood project, and Marcos already knows the rhythm: a few good years here, then on to the next community that needs a mat.
Not a Fight Club
Ask Marcos what he built and he won't say "gym." He'll say family, and he'll mean it as a description of the atmosphere at the door.
You don't open the door and see the fight club, where everybody inside wants to prove something. He's a family. He's a big family. You see children, you see little girls. He's very respectful.
You can measure that kind of culture by how far people will travel for it. One of his brown belts commutes two hours each way.
He lived very far away from here. It's two hours by car. And he comes here every time. He works in a big company—I think the biggest company in the world, they make ships. He had an opportunity to train there, but he wanted to come here. Two hours by car.
There's a Delta pilot who trains every time he lands in Amsterdam. Others ride public transport an hour or more to make class.
None of them have to. All of them do.
That family extends to who can afford the door, so Marcos keeps it open in a literal, financial sense too.
Amsterdam issues a low-income discount card called the Stadspas, and he honors it on the mats the same way the city honors it at museums and theaters.
In the Netherlands, we have a card for people that don't have much money. It gives you a discount in the cinema, the theater, the museum—and also in the jiu-jitsu. And then you work also with these people that don't have much money to pay.
It's the Carlson ethos, handed down intact. Marcos frames it as the whole point of what his teacher did for the sport.
Before Royce Gracie, the jiu-jitsu was closed with the Gracie family and only rich people can pay for that. And then Carlson Gracie opened it. The goal for Carlson Gracie was to make good fighters—not rich fighters, good fighters.
A gym built on that idea attracts a particular kind of loyalty. It also grows into a real business—and at some point, a real business needs to be run like one.
Googling His Way to the Right Software
For years Marcos ran the operational side on a general, all-sports platform that priced him by check-ins.
More people through the door meant a bigger bill—a strange thing to penalize when growth is the goal. He wanted something built for his sport, not a tool that treated a jiu-jitsu academy like a badminton court.
So he opened a browser.
I was looking for software for BJJ. And then I Google—BJJ, BJJ, BJJ. And then I find Gymdesk.
Anyone who has switched gym management software knows where the dread lives: moving everything—members, contracts, history—without breaking something mid-migration.
To change from one software to another, it's tough, man. And you guys gave me one month free. And in that one month, I studied Gymdesk a lot. And then I really decided to change, because it just really helped me a lot.
The free month did what a free month should—it let him learn the platform before betting his gym on it.
He ran both systems in parallel for about a year, using the old one only to hold records for inactive students, then moved everyone over.
He liked the belt tracking, liked the schedule, kept his own Stripe billing, and used the bundled website to replace a web tool he'd been paying for separately.
None of that is why people drive two hours to train with him.
But it's what lets him spend those two hours teaching instead of untangling spreadsheets.
The Door Is Open
There's a line Marcos comes back to when he talks about what the black belt gave him. It's not about medals or degrees. It's about welcome.
Everywhere I go, the door is open for me.
He learned that from a man who opened a door for a 14-year-old kid with no money in Copacabana.
Twenty-five years into building his own academy in a city that once had no jiu-jitsu at all, Marcos "Flexa" Neves Mello is still holding it open—for the two-hour commuters, the shy beginners, the ones who can only afford the discount card.
A martial arts gym community like that doesn't start with a building. Sometimes it starts with a piece of mat, a patch of grass, and someone willing to teach.
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Sean has spent the last decade creating content that helps businesses—small and not so small—grow smarter to allow operators to do more of what they love. You know, the fun stuff.
From shipping and international logistics to web development and marketing, he's done the work (not just the words) to scale retail and service businesses efficiently.
You can find his work at Sendle, Shogun, The Retail Exec, Gymdesk, and more.
