She Was Told an All-Women Gym Would Never Work. That Was 21 Years Ago.
Starring
Sarah Oriza started martial arts in 1996 at fifteen, at a Jeet Kune Do school that, like many of that era, moved toward MMA. She competed professionally in MMA and jiu-jitsu—including a 2009 bout against Miesha Tate before Tate reached the UFC—then moved fully into coaching. She is a BJJ black belt who subsidized the gym out of pocket for years.
Allie Szymoniak is a black belt who joined G.I.R.L.S. Gym in 2012 and now trains gi and no-gi about equally. She started with three months of kickboxing only, because jiu-jitsu intimidated her, and stayed after Sarah told her she could always go back to kickboxing if it didn't take: "I was pretty intimidated by jiu-jitsu... but then I fell in love with it and haven't stopped since." Her first gi was a wedding gift from Sarah, about nine months in.
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.
đź“Ť Address: 7427 SE 52nd Ave, Portland, OR 97206
đź“ž 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.
