Our story
One blue belt, a three-month visa, and no plan at all.
Jose Gomes found jiu-jitsu at 16, back in Brazil. He’d tried karate and capoeira first, and neither one grabbed him. Jiu-jitsu did. What hooked him was that he could roll for real from day one, instead of tapping pads and pretending.
The journey
Every belt above blue, Jose earned on these mats.
New Zealand wasn’t much of a decision. A mate mentioned an island at the bottom of the world you could get into on a three-month visa, and that was enough. Jose landed with barely a word of English and no idea what came next, a gym least of all. He just wanted to see somewhere new, and to keep training while he was there.
There was no jiu-jitsu in Queenstown. None in Central Otago. So Jose started teaching, for one simple reason. He wanted people to train with. He earned his purple, brown and black belts here, flying home for camps and leaning on the odd visiting black belt while he had no coach of his own. Slowly, teaching became coaching. Coaching became a school. The school became a family.
Fifteen to two hundred
Jose never chased any of it, which is exactly why it worked. Fifteen people became more than two hundred. One mat in Queenstown became a family of academies across the South Island.
The year one blue belt started teaching in Queenstown.
From the first fifteen members to one of the biggest academies in the country.
Academies across the South Island, all grown from the same room.
In Jose’s words
“I never counted on it, so I was never afraid it wouldn’t work. It’s something I do because I love it.”
Jose GomesHead professor · 4th degree black belt
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