Rochester's BJJ Gyms: Three Schools, Three Day Jobs

One trip out to Rochester started at 6:15 in the morning. Open mat had been going since six without him.

Another trip, hail. Light hail, he was careful to say, like that made it better.

On another it rained the whole hour and a half from his place.

Rochester never once gave him a nice day. It gave him three BJJ schools scattered across the metro—one southeast on Monroe Avenue, one north in Irondequoit, one out west in Gates, tucked inside a youth sports complex between two soccer fields.

Somewhere in the Gates interview he mentioned a survey Gymdesk had run on its own customers the year before, asking why they started the business.

"Like 80% of our customers are passion first. They have a, they do something else, but they have something special they want to share with the world."

He was saying this to a Rochester police officer standing on his own mat. Then he asked: you're full-time dads, multiple children and part of the police force. Is that right?

"That's right."

Not one of these three schools is anybody's job.

A software architect runs one, and four families who all work somewhere else run another. The third belongs to a cop who can get called out of his own class with no notice and no argument.

That constraint shaped all three gyms.

Nova Jiu Jitsu: The Instructors Hidden in the Room

Third floor of a building on Monroe Avenue, southeast side. Suite 300. Jason Plaisted took the school over in 2009 from his own instructor, Kyle Saunders, who was leaving town.

He's a third-degree black belt under Roy Harris. He's also a software architect at a government software company, which is the part he leads with when you ask what he does.

Alex put the obvious framing to him. You have a full-time job, but you do this for other reasons. A passion project.

And then he moved on.

Nova has moved four times since 2009. The first one ended when a CrossFit class dropped enough weight overhead to get them evicted; the later ones were about reaching for space.

The room kept changing. The people didn't.

"They kind of don't really care about what the space looks like much because they just want good training and that's what we gave them."

Nova is one of the oldest Brazilian jiu-jitsu schools in Rochester, and Jason reckons it has more upper belts than any school in the area. He counts them like staff.

A gym its owner can't always reach needs somebody else who can teach the class.

The kids program isn't his either. Joe Di Fiore, judo black belt, father of five, started it about five years ago and runs it. Fifty or sixty kids now.

When forty of them are on the mat at once, parents step in and help instruct, and a good number of those parents end up signing up themselves.

He went looking for the gym's software himself, which is roughly what a software architect does with a free Saturday.

He found Gymdesk through a Google search, moved Nova off the platform they were on (Zen Planner, he thinks), then embedded its calendar straight into the gym's website so the class times keep themselves current.

Nova's fuller story covers the four moves, the women's program that's now seven or eight years deep, and the fundamentals classes.

It's all in how Nova built its community, alongside the Nova Jiu Jitsu episode.

Rochester Jiu Jitsu: Four Families and a Billing Problem

This is the hail trip. North of the city, Titus Avenue in Irondequoit, next door to a pizzeria.

Brennan Strimple and his wife Lee founded it in 2014 as Rochester Phoenix Martial Arts.

It goes by Rochester Jiu Jitsu now, and the rebrand is right there on their own homepage—same families, a name that matches what they actually teach.

It opened as a karate school. Then somebody ran a jiu-jitsu pilot with the kids.

The BJJ kids got there in about a week.

They eventually retired karate altogether. That was the curriculum Brennan spent years building, and the belt he earned in 2002.

Brennan's instinct from the beginning was to not be the whole gym.

That instinct turned into ownership. George and Veronica Curran bought in, then Daniel Curran and his wife, then head coach Jason Eggleston and his wife. Four families.

(George Curran and Daniel Curran aren't related. It comes up on camera.)

They run on EOS with roles that don't overlap. George on numbers and growth, Dan on operations, instructor development and scheduling, Brennan on curriculum, Jason Eggleston as the gym's ambassador and conflict-resolver.

"It's just a lot of complimentary skills and it works to just make us a stronger whole."

The systems mostly protect small things.

"Like help us keep track of everyone's stripes. Like I never forget to promote anyone or anything like that. Little things like that really matter for people. No one wants to be forgotten."

They plan like the structure will hold. A ten-year goal of 600 students. Satellite schools, because members already drive 45 minutes each way.

The structure also buys them things a single owner couldn't staff. They run a tournament league they invited other area schools into, currently free, so competing doesn't bankrupt parents the way wrestling season can.

There's also an annual Tap Cancer Out hour where the adults roll bell-to-bell without stopping, because, as one of the partners puts it, people fighting cancer don't get to stop either. It raised five thousand dollars last year.

None of that happens if one person is already doing the billing at midnight.

How the partnership actually divides up is covered in four-family partnership structure. The Rochester Jiu Jitsu episode has the rest.

Shogun West BJJ: The Gym That Runs When the Owner Gets Called Out

The rain trip took him out west to Gates, inside Total Sports Experience on Elmgrove Road, in a building that runs lacrosse and travel-team families through its doors all week long.

It started on a drive home from a men's church retreat in 2021. Phil suggested his two brothers-in-law, Cody Goodfriend and Don, should open a gym.

Cody hadn't considered it. He'd been teaching cops for a decade and had never thought about doing it after hours.

They prayed on it for six months, then opened in June 2022 in a converted office space at Phil's father's office park, rent-free, running paper sign-in cards.

They showed up to empty rooms for a while.

Cody has been a Rochester police officer for over fifteen years and on the full-time SWAT team for ten of them. Don is a police officer too. Phil isn't law enforcement at all—he works from home and runs the admin.

Which means Cody can be gone with no notice, in the middle of his own class.

That happens on a regular basis. So the curriculum is shared and sequential. Every coach works the same months-long progression, and a class doesn't change character depending on who's standing on the mat that night.

"It's not one day Cody's teaching arm bars on Monday and I'm teaching next guard on Tuesday."

No front desk, no receptionist. Whichever coach isn't teaching walks over and shakes your hand. Attendance gets watched closely enough that a quiet two-week absence earns a phone call before it becomes a cancellation.

"If we haven't seen you in a couple of weeks, we'll just reach out. Hey, is everything going all right, man?"

Three years in, kids classes run twenty to twenty-five a session and have topped forty. The owners have never paid themselves a dollar.

"If you looked at our books, I would cry… we've never taken a dollar from this gym."

They want to start paying their coaching staff.

There's a scholarship fund named after a late training partner of Cody's that covers most or all of a membership for anyone who can't swing it.

The Shogun West BJJ episode has the rest of it.

What These Three Rochester Schools Have in Common

The table is the short version.

The day job is the premise

Jason Plaisted says "side hobby" about a school he's run since 2009. Cody answers a career question with fifteen years on the force and ten on SWAT. And George opens his explanation this way:

"I work full-time job."

None of the three talks about quitting to do this properly. Which surprises people who assume every gym owner is white-knuckling toward the day they go full-time.

Alex's 80% number says these three are the normal case among the schools Gymdesk works with. Keep that in mind if you're starting a martial arts school and assuming you'll quit your job to do it.

Somebody else has to be able to teach

Nova has the black belts hidden in the room, and Joe Di Fiore owns the kids program. Rochester Jiu Jitsu splits instruction, operations and finance across different partners, so one person's absence stops nothing.

Shogun West did it with martial arts curriculum. Sequential, shared, the same for every coach, so coverage is invisible from the mat.

The admin is what breaks first

Shogun West started on paper sign-in cards. Rochester Jiu Jitsu was heading for spreadsheets nobody had evenings left to maintain, and Nova's owner went shopping for a platform himself and wired its calendar into the website.

Nobody opens a jiu-jitsu school because they're excited about the billing.

The same tracking does the gym retention work too. Shogun West's two-week check-in happens because attendance is visible. Rochester Jiu Jitsu never misses a stripe because promotions are tracked, and nobody wants to be the guy who got forgotten at a promotion.

What Are Some Good BJJ Gyms in Rochester, NY?

Three well-established BJJ gyms in Rochester, NY are Nova Jiu Jitsu (Monroe Ave), Rochester Jiu Jitsu (Irondequoit), and Shogun West BJJ (Gates). All three are schools Gymdesk Originals has filmed. Here's what each is best at:

• Nova Jiu Jitsu (Monroe Ave): the city's most established BJJ room, open since 2009, and by Jason's reckoning the one with the most upper belts around. Gi and no-gi, dedicated fundamentals classes, a long-running women's program, 50-60 kids. Best fit if you want technical depth and don't want to get thrown into sparring in week one.
• Rochester Jiu Jitsu (Irondequoit): multi-discipline and family-first, with no-gi BJJ, Judo and Muay Thai under one roof, a large kids program, and a free local tournament league. Best fit for families who want more than one thing to train, together.
• Shogun West BJJ (Gates, inside Total Sports Experience): BJJ-focused for adults, with a twelve-month kids character curriculum and a scholarship fund that takes cost off the table. Best fit if you're bringing kids, or if money is genuinely tight right now.

This is what Alex found on three trips, not a ranking of every gym in Monroe County. Rochester's scene runs deeper than three schools.

Three Schools, One Constraint, More to Come

Across three visits and no good weather, Rochester handed over a software architect who calls his fifteen-year-old academy a side hobby, and four families who cut a business into pieces small enough to carry. Then a SWAT officer who has to be able to walk out mid-class.

They all want more than they've got. Rochester Jiu Jitsu talks about six hundred students and satellite schools; both they and Shogun West want their coaches on an actual wage.

None of them ever got to build a school around their own availability. So they built schools that work without it.

Nova survived four moves, and Rochester Jiu Jitsu absorbed three new ownership families without a split. Shogun West went from empty rooms to kids classes that have topped forty in three years, and still hasn't paid its owners.

An hour west, Buffalo has its own version of this in Takeover Jiu-Jitsu. Their Takeover Jiu-Jitsu episode is up too.

Alex keeps making the drive. Rochester, so far, keeps holding up its end on the weather.

Treat this as a living dispatch from Rochester and Western New York, with more schools added as we visit them. Other cities are up on Gymdesk Originals—including Toronto martial arts gyms and London BJJ gyms.