How One of Oregon's First Female Black Belts Built Unicorn Jiu Jitsu
Starring
Hillary VanOrnum is a black belt of more than ten years and one of Oregon's first female black belts. She came up training almost entirely with men twice her size, started in 2005, and opened Unicorn Jiu Jitsu in 2019 to build the room she never had. She still works full-time as a paralegal.
Brian VanOrnum is a black belt who took Masters Worlds gold at blue and purple, and didn't start training until Hillary was already a purple belt. He now runs the gym full-time—noon classes, kids classes, customer service, and all of its Gymdesk administration.
About the Gym
Unicorn Jiu Jitsu is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu academy at 9220 SE Stark Street in Portland's Montavilla neighborhood, opened in 2019 and affiliated with One Jiu Jitsu USA under Giva Santana since January 2020. It runs adult gi and no-gi, kids classes, a little-kids program for ages four to six, kickboxing, a members-only Friday study hall, and a Sunday open mat that's open to the public.
The instructor bench is deliberately deep and varied, with the stated goal that no student ends up a carbon copy of the owners. The room has held as many as 100 people for a Girls in Gis event, and the gym's annual three-day women's camp, Gathering of the Unicorns, has grown past technique into health and wellness programming. Unicorn has run on Gymdesk since day one—roughly seven years, back to when the product was called Martial Arts on Rails.
📍 Address: 9220 SE Stark Street, Portland, OR 97216 (Montavilla)
📞 Phone: (971) 386-5989
Summary
Unicorn Jiu Jitsu sits on SE Stark Street in Portland's Montavilla neighborhood—a little over 2,000 square feet of mat inside roughly 3,300 total, because the owners kept the lounge small on purpose. Hillary VanOrnum opened it in 2019, after years of teaching a women's class at someone else's academy where every guest instructor and every camp had to be negotiated through another owner's calendar.
The episode is about how the room runs, not what's on the schedule. The name became a filter—Hillary's sponsors had started calling her the unicorn because a female black belt in Oregon was that rare, and it quietly kept the fight-first crowd away. Her husband Brian runs the day-to-day while she keeps a full-time paralegal job, and a purple belt teaches the no-gi class because she's better at it than the owners are.
