Decided on a Rock at Low Tide: How Monarch Jiu-Jitsu Got Its Start

Alex Cuevas makes his confession in a car, before he ever sets foot on the mat.

So, being a reasonable man with a fear of no-gi, he went looking for one of the best no-gi rooms in the New York area.

The search ended in Malverne, a village on Long Island about 15 minutes from Hofstra.

Nick Gullo, who owns the room, calls Malverne a great town. His case for the location is that people can see the gym from the street and find somewhere to park. It's hard to argue with.

The gym is Monarch Jiu-Jitsu Academy, and Wednesday night is the advanced class. That night it was no-gi. Of course.

Afterward, Nick found Alex on the mat. Alex called it a tough class. Nick said Wednesday is always busy.

Alex had done his best.

Then they sat down, and Nick told him how he came to own the room. Before Monarch, he was one of the head instructors at another gym and about to co-own a new gym with its owner and one other instructor.

Then he got fired. The next day, lying on a rock at low tide, he decided to open his own place.

Nobody would draw that up as a plan for opening a jiu-jitsu gym. Then again, nobody plans to tear an ACL either, and that's part of this story too.

From a Lifting Gym to Levittown

Nick didn't start anywhere fancy. He started at a regular lifting gym that happened to offer jiu-jitsu one day a week.

He hit it off with the guy teaching it, who told him to go sign up somewhere proper. That guy trained at Serra Jiu-Jitsu.

So one day Nick walked into Serra's. About a year in, he tore his ACL, which, like I said, is part of this story.

After that, he was all in, training with Matt Serra and Matt's brothers.

Alex offered the lineage for anyone who lives under a rock: Renzo Gracie, then John Danaher, then Matt Serra. Nick stopped him.

"It's actually the other way around."

Matt came first, Nick said. As Nick understands it, he and Danaher came up as training partners, and neither was the other's student.

Alex took the correction well.

"Okay, I guess I was under a rock."

Back then, the Renzo lineage had a rule: no no-gi until you had four stripes. So Nick spent 2012 through 2014 strictly in the gi. Around blue belt, he found Jason Rau at Serra's Levittown location.

Every gym has its lore, and Levittown's goes something like this: outside of names like Garry Tonon, Gordon Ryan, and Eddie Cummings, you could put the Levittown guys against anybody.

That's Nick's telling of it, anyway.

"The Levittown location rivaled any New York location, and any New York city location, bar none."

He drilled with Jason before and after class. Around 2015 or 2016, the room shifted toward leg locks, and Nick, who was tired of getting thrown around in the gi, was thrilled.

Jason pushed him to start competing.

His first tournament was the New York Open at blue belt, and he won it. His second was Worlds, where he remembers 132 people in his bracket.

Nick is a black belt under Jason now. His guard game came out of all those rounds against him.

"I just didn't have a choice cause I was going against Jason three times a day."

Nine Months Away From the Restaurant

Off the mat, Nick worked at his family's restaurant.

His first try at a way out was a tournament of his own, run like a wrestling dual meet. He lined up the location and the mats, and he signed teams the old way.

"I literally went door to door because again, social media wasn't what it is now. So I literally went to gyms all throughout Long Island and knocked on their door and, like, told the owner, 'Hey, this is what we're doing. We'd love to have your team on board.'"

All that knocking, and the event never happened.

"And then again, inevitably did not come to fruition. And when it, when that happened, it kind of like set me back a bit, like immensely."

So he left.

A trip he'd planned with a buddy turned into about nine months in Southeast Asia, a lot of it in Bali. He trained every day and ate breakfast before training, like a man with no restaurant to get back to. Which, for the time being, he was.

Jason, meanwhile, kept calling.

"Dude, like if you're serious about jiu-jitsu, you need to get back here. Like everybody's training for ADCC, like Garry Tonon's throwing people through the wall."

When he came home, he trained the morning and noon sessions in the city at least three times a week.

The room was competing at the highest level. Gordon Ryan won his first ADCC title while Nick was there, and they had it on the TV.

Competing, though, never came easy to him.

And the matches he quit weren't always ones he was losing.

"You know, there was nothing worse than going in, knowing you can or should win, right? And then going in and just not having it."

He did the work. His best year was 2019, and he means his head space. He went into matches confident.

Then COVID closed the Levittown location.

"I was in Queens, I was in Manhattan, I was in even the Bronx, Brooklyn. It was so much, and I didn't have a home."

He was 32 or 33 and starting to wonder how realistic the competition goals were. He picked coaching.

At the Ceiling

After COVID, Nick became one of the head instructors at another gym. It paid well. It also ran him into the ground.

He means that about as literally as a schedule can mean it.

"I was teaching, I don't even know how many classes. I was doing anywhere between, I don't know, 10 to 13 privates a week on top of the workload. And then of course, getting your own training in. I mean, you're literally up near 40 hours and that's for jiu-jitsu."

Privates were a big part of how the job paid, and a big part of why it ate his week. We broke down what BJJ instructors make elsewhere, privates included.

He was in his 30s, with one ACL already spent. That's about the age your knees start sending memos.

Still, he was happy. And a plan came along that made the hours look worth it: he, the gym's owner, and one other guy would open another gym together, all three as co-owners.

Nick said yes.

For Reasons He Won't Get Into

Now, Nick keeps this next part short, and so will we.

"And then it just started getting a little bit weird at that place for reasons I won't even get into here. And inevitably ended up getting fired from that gym."

He asked the obvious question on his way out.

"I was like, 'What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to be doing now? We were gonna open a gym together.' He goes, 'This is gonna be the worst thing that ever happened to you.' And I really sat on that."

A Rock at Low Tide

The next day happened to be his anniversary with his then-girlfriend.

Nick's first worry after the firing had been what to tell her. Her answer was that he'd figure it out.

They took a hike and ended up stretched out on a big boulder sitting in the ocean. It was low tide, late April, and the sun was coming down just right.

(Deciding your future on a rock while the tide comes in feels like a metaphor. It was also just what the tide does whether you're there or not.)

He made the calls: his family, Jason, and Frank Rosenthal, who owns Phantom Jiu-Jitsu Academy in Herndon, Virginia. He asked a lot of questions. Did they think he had it?

Jason had a short answer.

"Dude, do it. You're more than capable."

And that, more or less, settled it.

"Once I made the decision to do it, I went full throttle, and I was just, everything for the next six months became, where is it gonna be? What's the name gonna be? All that stuff."

What If It's More Successful?

Nick had the usual first-owner question: what if nobody shows up? One of the people he leaned on flipped it on him.

"I asked him, I said, what do you think? What if I don't get the members? What if I don't get the students? What if this?"

The answer came back as another question.

Nick never names who said it. That worry came before he'd decided. Once he had, it went away, and he names who had his back.

"I never had that feeling, but that was because I had good people behind me, you know?"

Two people in particular.

"Like Jason, Jason Rau, helped me so much in the beginning. Frank Rosenthal, who also uses Gymdesk. They're extremely helpful in making me feel confident that I could do it."

The confidence didn't help with the hours, though.

Every list of BJJ academy startup costs leaves out the owner's sleep, and the first three months took most of Nick's.

"And then once we started, I mean, the first three months, I mean, it was a lot just in terms of I was doing so much and I was kind of killing myself a little bit. And I had to quickly find more help the best I could, which I did."

These days, he tells it like this.

He was angry about it for a while, and he says so. Then:

"But again, in turn, it was the best thing that ever happened to me."

Gi First in a No-Gi Gym

When people come in for an intro, Nick gives them the same pitch, and it's light on numbers.

He's been around enough gyms to know what he doesn't want: rooms that run on cliques. He's never kicked anybody out, he said.

Mostly the members handle it themselves.

"People are very good at kind of checking their ego at the door and being friendly to everybody when they get here. And that's like the best part."

Then there's the gi. Monarch is a no-gi dominant school, and Nick steers newcomers to the gi anyway.

"I really try and push and guide the newcomers to the gi, so that they at least get a feel, because I feel like when you first start jiu-jitsu out, you feel like you're doing jiu-jitsu way earlier if you do the gi versus no-gi."

In the gi, Nick says, a beginner can grab a collar and sleeve, post a foot on the hip, and swing to De La Riva inside a day or two. You can't do that in no-gi as a beginner.

Nick won't call the gi training wheels, because it's too deep for that, but he does think it helps new people see the light.

Alex put it as getting a little of the reward back early. Nick told him he'd nailed it. It's a cheap idea to steal for onboarding new students.

The part of coaching he likes best shows up most in the kids' classes.

Nick told Alex about a girl who came in so timid she barely spoke. The day before filming, he was about to step in and help her when she started coaching her training partner instead.

The Wall Nick Wants to Knock Down

Not everything at Monarch is figured out yet, and Nick will tell you so himself. Muay Thai is the big one.

As Nick puts it, a beginner can survive a jiu-jitsu class by drilling slowly. Muay Thai is jump rope, shadowboxing, and pad work, and it's hard on new people.

"So we're having trouble kind of figuring out the balance and like how to actually like get the people to like stay. We have a decent base of them, but that is a problem right now that we are trying to figure out."

The other open question came from a parent.

The day of filming, someone asked Nick whether he'd ever run kickboxing for the kids. He'd need more hours in the day, and more space. The answer depends on a wall.