She Was Told an All-Women Gym Would Never Work. It's Still Full 21 Years Later.

The mat room on SE 52nd Avenue in Portland has blue wall pads, a tatami-look floor, and NO EXCUSES painted on the wall in letters you can read from the door. Behind that there's a mural—a woman's face and a gloved fist inside a red circle. Along the side: a rack of gloves and pads, a coat rack, a bottle of sanitizer, a framed sign that says Believe.

Five o'clock is kickboxing. Six is jiu-jitsu. Seven is kickboxing again.

Every student on the mat is a woman. That's true of the five o'clock, and it's true of every other class on the board at G.I.R.L.S. Gym, seven days a week. A couple of the coaches are men, including the owner's husband. Nobody else in the building is.

One member trains in a rash guard that reads I DON'T CONSENT TO HUGS.

A women's program is usually one class on a co-ed schedule. Here it's the whole business.

Sarah Oriza opened it. She'll go this far and no further on what that makes it:

She has over 150 members and ten coaches. Membership has gone up every single year she's been open, COVID included, though she'll tell you there were stretches in there where she didn't think the place would survive.

And she didn't set out to build any of it.

1996, and Two Other Women in the Room

Sarah started training in 1996, at fifteen, because her boyfriend at the time was doing it. (He is now her husband, co-founder, and one of the gym's five black belts. That part takes a while to get to.)

The school was Jeet Kune Do, which in the nineties meant a little of everything—Thai boxing, Western boxing, jiu-jitsu, Filipino stick fighting.

There was a class for each of them and you picked what you went to. The sparring was hard.

"In the nineties, it was like you survived or you didn't. When you went into those classes, you sparred hard. They just kind of threw you into everything."

Over the first couple of years there were two other women in her classes, she thinks.

She was also, by her own account, the last kid you'd have picked for this. She didn't play sports and she had no confidence. Ask her what the training gave her and she skips past technique entirely.

She doesn't dwell on how hard the room was. She talks about the men in it being decent to her, and what that meant for whether she stayed.

"Everybody was really accepting and welcoming despite the fact that I was a 15 year old girl. And I really appreciate that, because if I hadn't had that, I probably wouldn't have stuck with it."

The Gym She Was Supposed to Build

Nine years later she and her husband opened their own school. Co-ed, heavy on the women's classes.

They called it The Snake Pit, in 2005—a name she wouldn't use today, because there were already a lot of martial arts schools called things like that. "It was like already kind of oversaturated."

The co-ed version did not last long either.

The Back Room That Was Never Cleaned

She tells this part sitting cross-legged on her own mat, under the mural, a class running behind her.

While she was running her own co-ed gym, Sarah was still training at other schools. At one of them she picked up a staph infection.

It went into her blood. She was hospitalized for a long stretch on a PICC line, with her husband giving her the injections.

The hospital's read was that it got in through a shaving nick from right before training.

She tells this the way you'd tell someone about a bad flight.

She never names the gym.

"Staph infection happens at a lot of different schools."

What she does describe is a room. She taught the women's class there, and when the men's class came in, the women got moved.

The infection put her in the hospital. What she decided in there came from how the people at that school handled it.

That was early 2006, and the schedule has been women only since. The mat protocol she runs now is a direct descendant—leaf blower first for the hair, then vacuum, then hospital-grade cleaner, plus regular deep cleans.

Twenty years on she still covers her knees to train.

‍"Like non-negotiable."

"You Have to Have Men"

Then came the part where everyone told her it wouldn't work.

The early years were not elegant. She worked a forty-hour accounting job to fund the place and paid out of pocket besides, and she got kicked out of location after location, over noise.

‍"They didn't like the sound of the Thai kicks."

Marketing was whatever was free. "I can hardly remember how I advertised. I think Craigslist, I think I flyered cars. Maybe I snuck up to people's doors and put flyers on their doors and then ran off."

What eventually moved the needle was competition results.

"We had fighters that we put out, which really helped us draw attention to ourselves. We do really well at the jiu-jitsu tournaments. So that helps people take us more seriously, which can be a little bit of a struggle sometimes with an all female martial arts school."

The Phone Call to Fight Miesha Tate

One of the fighters she put out was herself.

In 2009 she got a call to fight Miesha Tate, who was in Strikeforce then, not yet in the UFC. Sarah took it, because in 2009 you took what you could get.

"At the time, there weren't a ton of women fighting and it was pretty hard to get fights. So you took what you could get. And I fought a lot of really tough people."

Her jiu-jitsu was the reason people knew her, and eight seconds into the second round it cost her the fight: she dropped her hands to shoot a takedown and caught a head kick.

She took about six more shots against the cage and broke an orbital bone somewhere in there. Her next memory is someone holding up fingers in the back.

Three months of feeling drunk followed. She fought once more, and then she read the situation.

She was a first-generation women's MMA pro at a time when getting a fight at all was the hard part, and she stopped because the other job was better.

What an All-Women Room Does to Technique

Training only with men had made her very hard to submit and not much of a threat.

The room does the same thing to everyone in it. Nobody can muscle through a bad grip, so the grip has to be right.

She's careful about what she claims for it, though. Ask her which art to master and she'll say jiu-jitsu, because leverage beats size. Ask her whether it's self-defense and the answer gets longer.

The Black Belts She Grew Herself

The gym has five black belts and five purple belts.

Sarah and her husband are two of the black belts, and both started elsewhere—she in 1996, he earlier still. The other three started here with no martial arts background at all. So did all five purple belts.

"We have three black belts that are homegrown. They started here from the very beginning. They didn't have previous martial arts skills. One of them's been training with me for 16 years."

Sixteen years.

The next two are somewhere around fourteen or fifteen.

What she screens for when she's deciding who coaches has nothing to do with talent:

‍"From the beginning, they've demonstrated an excitement to help other people learn."

Allie Szymoniak is a black belt who's been there since 2012. She very nearly wasn't.

Sarah told her she could quit and go back to kickboxing before she ever tried it. So she tried it. She's been on those mats since 2012, and now she teaches jiu-jitsu.

Handing someone the exit before they walk in is how you get a beginner onto the mat. It's also, eventually, how you get a black belt.

The Payment She Missed for a Year

For a long time the business ran on spreadsheets and pieces.

So she shopped around, and she'll tell you exactly who she looked at.

"And I looked at Mindbody, you know, I looked at all these other software options. You guys didn't make me call and talk to anybody to set it up. That made me choose you."

She set up Gymdesk billing herself, on her own time, without booking a demo.

"I haven't missed another payment since then."

Ranks live in the same place now instead of a separate worksheet, fed by attendance so she can see who's actually earned a stripe. All ten coaches have logins, for ranks and for emergency contacts on a mat full of people.

The worksheet is gone, and a failed payment isn't invisible anymore. That's what the gym management software bought her.

Twenty-One Years

Ask Sarah for the win and she doesn't reach for the membership number.

"I had a student that you would have never expected to do a competition. And she didn't do terribly well, but because she stepped on a competition mat and didn't ever believe that she could, after that she was walking around, you could just see the difference of her body, her head being higher."

She and her husband have been together thirty years and have run this thing together for most of them.

They took a trip for the anniversary. Over dinner he asked who was in class, and she pulled up the gym cameras at the table.

"And then I'm happy. It's good, busy classes."

She's not stopping. There might be a second location eventually. She says one is already a lot.

She was told for years that she'd need men in the building to make the numbers work. Membership has gone up every year anyway.