University Executive by Day, Jiu-Jitsu Professor by Night: Inside Chicago MMA
Starring
Kevin Manko leads the kids' program at Chicago MMA. A longtime student who has trained for more than a decade, he's spent the last several years building out the youth classes—running them twice a week at the South Loop location and four days a week in Lincoln Park. His approach is fun-first: kids don't care about every step and every detail the way adults do, so he meets them where they are. On camera he tells the story of a teenager who came in dealing with bullying and a tanked sense of confidence, and who now "stands a little taller."
Misho Ceko is a fourth-degree Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt under Ralph Gracie and the founder of Chicago MMA. The son of Bosnian immigrants raised on Chicago's South Side, he found jiu-jitsu in 1998 after a magazine article led him to Ralph Gracie's academy in Mountain View, California—about a block from his house—where he trained alongside BJ Penn and the Camarillo brothers and earned his black belt in 2004. He went on to train Muay Thai under Mark DellaGrotte in Boston and, during a United Nations posting in Mozambique, ended up running rolls out of his apartment and opening a school there. He founded Chicago MMA in 2010. By day he runs business operations at the University of Chicago; by night and on weekends he teaches at the gym he built.
About the Gym
Chicago MMA (Chicago Mixed Martial Arts) is a two-location martial arts academy teaching Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, MMA, and a growing kids program. Professor Misho Ceko opened the original Chicago MMA in Lincoln Park in 2010 and added a second location in the South Loop in October 2025—a purpose-built space with no front desk, kiosk check-in, full locker rooms, a weight room, and a second matted area.
Misho is a fourth-degree Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt under Ralph Gracie with a Muay Thai background under Mark DellaGrotte's Sityodtong lineage, and he's built the gym around a belief that the discipline is converging—that most serious schools are moving toward mixed martial arts rather than any single style. The academy runs a competition fight team alongside everyday classes for adults and kids, and Misho teaches in the evenings and on weekends while a coaching staff carries the daytime load.
📍 Lincoln Park (original): 1528 N Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60642
📍 South Loop: 110 E Cermak Rd, Chicago, IL 60616
Summary
This is the story of a man who runs two lives at once. Professor Misho Ceko spends his days as an executive at the University of Chicago and his nights on the mats at Chicago MMA, the academy he founded in Lincoln Park in 2010. He's the son of Bosnian immigrants who grew up on Chicago's South Side—his mom cleaned hotel rooms for thirty years, his dad worked the steel mill—and he found jiu-jitsu in 1998 at Ralph Gracie's legendary Mountain View academy, training alongside BJ Penn before earning his black belt in 2004.
A career in academia and a United Nations posting took him from California to Boston to Mozambique and finally back home to Chicago, where he built a school that now spans two locations. Sitting across from Alex—a friend of three decades who turns out to share the same immigrant-kid upbringing—Misho explains why his dad still tells him to "go get a real job," why the brutal training room that hooked him isn't the one he wants to run, and how martial-arts-specific software let a part-time owner put two gyms on one system in under a month.
