Team in Dallas. Photo: Personal archives
Part of team Nova União is gathered in the United States, where they prepare for the Jiu-Jitsu World Championship. During this first week of their training camp, the team is camped out at Octagon MMA in Dallas, where Bruno Bastos teaches.
“I’m all beat up. Marcelino Freitas, Rodrigo Feijão and Daniel Garcia are all here. We’re also training at Travis Lutter’s gym, where there’s a really tough crew getting ready for the Worlds, and also Gustavo Dantas’s gang, which is prime for the championship,” says Bastos.
Nova União is restructuring its Jiu-Jitsu department and the first results are beginning to show through. At this year’s Brazilian National Championship the team took third place.
“We did really well during the first weekend of the Brazilian Nationals and were in second place, but it was hard to keep up as we didn’t have a lot of black belts. Even so we took third. This Worlds our goal is to manage at least 10 medals in all the belts. We still won’t be able to win, but the idea is that next year we’ll go in with a bigger team. Right now we’re holding camps for the big events and we’ll continue to organize ourselves. We’re going to grow,” remarks Rodrigo Feijão, one of the leaders of this reformulation effort.
Daniel Garcia (in blue) is one of the team's new hopes. Photo: Carlos Ozorio
Among those NU’s hopes ride on are the Broadnax twins, with Christian having won his weight group and the absolute at the Pan as a juvenile blue belt. This time the duo will debut in the adult competition. Nor can we forget about Steven Rosenberg, third place at the last Worlds as a lightweight brown belt, but who will fight as a black belt this time, and the new stalwart at black belt Daniel Garcia, and already established members of the team, Ricardo Demente, Bruno Bastos and Marcelino Freitas.
“Training is going really good. We started last Sunday and we have a lot of tough training partners. Bruno will be in fine form and me too,” warns Marcelino, who will have a rocky road ahead of him in the featherweight division.
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