Making space for women
Written by Shanti Gorton, Tuesday 3rd September 2024
We’ve been busy at Women Who Fight, and over the next 6 weeks will be hosting two of our biggest events. We are super excited to be running our second Women Who Fight Invitational this month, bringing eight of the best female grapplers in the UK and Europe onto the same stage to compete for the prize of £2.5k. We’re working with the Grapple Club again to bring you the most exciting female grappling show with a ruleset to keep up the matches' high intensity! It’s going to be an all female show, with three fantastic high level female grapplers commentating and three female referees. We’re so excited to put on a show that we truly believe in!
We all know how important fair representation is, it sets the standard for others to follow and encourages under represented groups to grow within the space. The success of women in sports like Crossfit leans heavily on the equal exposure given to both men and women from the start, and is something BJJ should learn from. The next generation of killers are starting their jiu jitsu journey as I type, and it will be only 5 years until some of these predators are competing at the highest level if they can see the opportunity for success and recognition. I don’t know where the perception comes from that there aren’t enough high level women to put on a great show - we know this isn’t the case. Our show last year was a great success, and the feedback said it was one of the most exciting grappling shows around. Medusa in America has some really exciting grapplers competing, with ADCC bringing in their 3rd bracket for women this year - bringing some insanely high level BJJ to the stage. We’re excited to give space to some really talented women on our show this month and create those opportunities that could help shape future generations.
We also have our first circle event at the start of October, which brings together everything we have learnt over the years about what best serves our community. We have the powerful and talented Nia Blackman coaching Gi and Nogi, straight off the back of her ADCC debut last month. Then we bring a sports performance psychologist Charlotte Ricca to give a workshop on techniques to compete at the highest level, which will help us rise to the challenge rather than running for the hills as soon as the competition season begins. We have included lots of rolling as we know how valuable that is for women grapplers - to get time on the mats with other women. Training with women is super important, and if you can’t make it to this event, we strongly encourage all women to find female training partners as it is so powerful in helping you improve your BJJ.
We are offering our substackers 10% off the circle with this discount code: 10CIRCLE24 (on top of the 5% for those who are paying substack members! - please get in touch for this discount).
If you hit any issues let us know! info@womenwhofight.co.uk.
Our WFI will be broadcast on this date: on youtube - we'll share a link nearer the time! Watch out for it on our instagram and website @womenwhofight.co.uk