女性専用ジムなんてうまくいかないと言われた。それが21年前のこと。
Starring
Sarah Orizaは1996年、15歳のときに截拳道(ジークンドー)の道場で武道を始めました。当時の多くの道場と同じく、そこもやがてMMAへと移っていきました。MMAと柔術でプロとして戦い、2009年にはUFC参戦前のMiesha Tateとも対戦。その後は指導に専念しています。BJJ黒帯で、何年もの間、自腹でジムを支えてきました。
Allie Szymoniakは黒帯で、2012年にG.I.R.L.S. Gymに入会し、今はギとノーギをほぼ半々で練習しています。柔術に気後れしていたため、最初の3か月はキックボクシングだけをしていました。「合わなければいつでもキックボクシングに戻れる」というSarahの言葉で柔術を始め、そのまま夢中になりました。最初の道着は、始めて9か月ほどの頃にSarahから贈られた結婚祝いです。
About the Gym
G.I.R.L.S. Gym (Grappling In Real Life Situations) is a women-only martial arts school at 7427 SE 52nd Avenue in Portland, Oregon. It offers gi and no-gi Brazilian jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, MMA, wrestling, open mats, and a competition team for all ages. This isn’t a women’s class inside a co-ed academy but a standalone facility where every session, seven days a week, is women only. A couple of coaches are male, including Sarah’s husband and co-founder.
The staff is five black belts and five purple belts—everyone but Sarah and her husband came up through the gym, with tenures often running fourteen to sixteen years. At its current address just over eight years, the gym survived COVID and now runs on Gymdesk, replacing a spreadsheet system that once let a member’s payment fail unnoticed for a year.
📍 Address: 7427 SE 52nd Ave, Portland, OR 97206
📞 Phone: 503-847-1681
Summary
G.I.R.L.S. Gym on SE 52nd Avenue in Portland teaches Brazilian jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, MMA, and wrestling to more than 150 members. It didn’t start that way. Sarah and her husband opened a co-ed gym in 2005 called The Snake Pit, built around a heavy slate of women’s classes; in early 2006 she converted the whole thing to women only, and it has stayed that way since.
This is what a business looks like when the niche is the entire model rather than a side door. Sarah heard “you’re never going to be able to make this work with just women” through the early years, alongside evictions over the noise of Thai kicks and covering payroll from an accounting salary.
What she has now is a coaching bench she grew herself—three of her five black belts and all five purple belts started at the gym with no prior martial arts, one training with her for sixteen years.
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