B-Team Jiu-Jitsu is entering a new chapter.

With Craig Jones stepping away from competition and shifting his attention to running the Craig Jones Invitational (CJI), the remaining team members are planning a major rebrand – one that turns B-Team into a full-fledged MMA gym.

The news broke during a recent episode of the Simple Man podcast, hosted by B-Team’s remaining leaders: Nicky Rodriguez, Damien Anderson, and Ethan Crelinsten.
For this special episode, Nicky Ryan also joined the crew to discuss the academy’s future:

Basically what’s happening is, Craig (Jones) and Seth (Belisle) are super busy with CJI, right? It’s a f***ing massive tournament.

It’s just easier for us to run the ship, we’re already doing it.
So it’s just a transfer of ownership, literally nothing is changing in the gym.

Rodriguez clarified that while operations would continue, there would be a shift in the gym’s overall approach:

Some things will change.
We’ll adjust the culture a little bit, different ideology behind training.

Especially with this whole eco stuff, it’s like making a transition towards it…
It’s more of a rebrand than an ending of anything.

Anderson gave more insight into what this rebrand entails:

We want to rebrand to a family gym where we can focus on the next generation of athletes and have like full encompassing martial arts.
It’ll be striking, wrestling, grappling…

Although Anderson himself is actively climbing the ranks in MMA and aiming for the UFC, he made it clear that they would bring in a world-class coach for striking when the time comes. Rodriguez reinforced that commitment:

We’ll specialise obviously in Jiu-Jitsu but when we’re ready for the expansion of other martial arts like striking, we’ll make sure that we have somebody who’s absolutely one of the best coaches in the world.

Finally, Nicky Ryan offered a practical look at why this move makes business sense in their current location:

There’s not too many like full MMA gyms in Austin, there’s a lot of Jiu-Jitsu gyms but there’s not really any like super high-level MMA gyms.

So we kinda plan to become like one of the first ones in Austin.

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