Germany’s Hannah is one of the biggest hopes for European BJJ. This 26 year old purple belt has placed 3rd at the IBJJF worlds at blue belt and this year, took first place at the IBJJF Europeans in Gi and No Gi.

Hanah trains at Fight Fusion Regensburg in Germany with her purple belt boyfriend Jan Zander. BJJEE spoke with Hannah to fond out more about her interesting back ground, her BJJ journey, her views on BJJ in Germany, getting more women in BJJ and her future plans.

Hi Hannah, please introduce yourself to the bjj community

Hey, my name is Hannah Rauch from Germany, I´m 26 years old and a purple belt in BJJ.

How did you start training and what is your BJJ story?

I started together with my boyfriend Jan Zander to engage in BJJ at the end of 2010. At the beginning in our city Regensburg, there was just a very small group of people who were interested in this sport. We had no teacher and watched some youtube tutorials to learn some new techniques. We trained just once a week for one or two hours. After three months Jan and I tried our first competition. Jan did compete at the Bavarian Cup and took the second place and I did compete at the ADCC–trials in Germany and took the first place. From this moment our hearts were on fire for BJJ. But we realized, that we needed more than just youtube tutorials to get better in what we were doing. Because of that we started to visit BJJ-seminars and trained in different gyms around the world. At this point we met Johannes With, who was our trainer. He also promoted us to blue and later on to purple belts.
Even as white belts we began to teach BJJ classes by ourselves to inspire more people in our city for this sport. Thereby we had more sparring partners for us to train with.

In 2012, we opened our first own school then. By the new gym a lot of new in BJJ interested people joined us and after one year we moved our gym to a bigger place. Right now we have a really great gym with a lot of students.
To inspire more women and kids for this sport, I started to teach special BJJ classes to kids and women. Right now I am very proud to have the biggest BJJ team for women in Germany and a really great kid’s team as well.
Of course, we have been in this time on many competitions and we won several titles.
My most important titles are right now the third place at the worlds in 2013 as a blue belt and my two European titles with gi and no gi this year as a purple belt.

You started the year perfectly winning the european gi and no gi. can you tell us about your training regimen?

Yes and it is such an honour for me. I am training every day and once a week we have a competition class where we push each other to the limit. My training is very mixed. I do drills, flow rolls, normal and hard rolls and I can train with different sparring partners.

What do you think about the growth of bjj in Germany? How do you see it in 5-10 years time?

The BJJ-community in Germany is growing from year to year, but compared to other countries still quite small. But by the fact that now MMA is slowly moving into German television, I see good chances that BJJ will be known much more in the next 5-10 years.

What are your short and long term goals in BJJ?

Some of my future goals are to bring our Team “Fight Fusion” continue to grow, to win the worlds and to be successful in the next belt levels.

What should be done to get more women into BJJ?

That‘s a good question. I think to take an interest to more women in BJJ classes, it is important to have a female teacher and separate classes for women. But there is some more important thing: Women have to be treated equal to men at competitions. Everywhere, little money is paid out to competitors in these sports. But if there are cash prizes, then usually only for men. In the absolutely rare cases of cash prizes for women, they get much less. Often this fact is justified by the fact that far fewer women have taken part in a competition. This is mostly true. But that should not be the problem of the women who participated. They were there and gave everything: afford of performance, power and professionalism. So they deserve the same cash reward. And it is not necessarily easier to win just because fewer participants took part. There are perhaps fewer but really strong opponents.

What’s next for you?

To participate in as much competitions as I can.

Feel free to thanks sponsors or friends

Thanks for the interview. I want to thank my sponsor “Adidas”, our whole team “Fight Fusion”, “ESP-Nutrition” for the support and most of all Jan for his support at every time and all the hard sparring rounds.