About

BJJ HAARLEM

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) shares its roots with modern Judo. Popularized by the Gracie family, Jiu Jitsu is an art form that puts the emphasis on the ground fight. Where Judo match ends with a takedown, a BJJ match only just begins. Players learn to immobilise a grounded opponent, and ultimately work their way to a lock or strangle that ends the match.

What makes the sport effective is that there is a lot of pressure testing against live resistance. Students will frequently test their skills against a non-cooperative trainingspartner in a pretty unrestricted ruleset. This ensures that their skill transfers from the mats to competitions or potential live situations.

As a new student you will likely have to forget what you thought you knew about movement, and relearn wonderful ways in which your body can work effectively and efficiently. Through that process you will develop core strength and agility. But BJJ isn’t just a physical exercise, it offers a mental challenge as large as the physical one. Students spend their time finding grips on each other that allow them to dominate another person. Every situation that arises in this way is like a little puzzle that a practitioner has to solve.

“What makes the sport effective is that … students will frequently test their skills against a non-cooperative trainingspartner”

Progress in BJJ is signified by belts just like in Judo. Students wear a belt to signify what level of understanding and ability they have in applying their game. Traditionally we recognise five colours of belts for adults; white, blue, purple, brown and black.

When you start BJJ you are designated the white belt, indicating that you are still learning your way around the sport. You are concerned with how to protect yourself against pins and submissions, and how choke and joint lock mechanics generally work. You are actively getting comfortabel in the most common positions.

You get a blue belt when you have developed enough skill to be able to beat someone who is bigger and stronger than you. A blue belt knows how to effectively isolate a part of their opponent’s body and attack it with all of theirs. Even with big size discrepancies that means you can level the playing field.

As you learn to sequence multiple submissions in to lines of attack, thereby forcing your opponent to fend off multiple of consecutive attacks, you grow into what it means to be a purple belt. You are now a fighter that can look a couple of moves ahead in a fight, and that is always looking for the finish. As a purple belt you set traps and you know how to fight towards the positions you are good at.

As you learn more and more lines of attack and show a deeper understanding of BJJ you grow into a brown belt. Now you have reliable submissions and you know how to find them and how to sequence between them properly. Brown belts are threats from everywhere, and will relentlessly keep attacking until they get the win.

After a while at brown you will find that along with the submissions you specialise in, you have a good understanding of all aspects of the sport. Not only are you able to bait people into your strong submissions, you are exploiting their strong positions for your gain. It is at this point that you become a black belt, signifying mastery.

Getting a hang of all these aspects of the game takes dedication and patience. On average a recreational practitioner takes around ten years to receive their black belt.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu was popularized to the world in the early nineties throught The Ultimate Fighting Championships, which we still know today as the UFC. In its conception the UFC pitted fighters from different martial arts against each other in a no-holds-barred fight  to see which martial art was best. BJJ stood out because the physically unimpressive Royce Gracie won the first four events with submission holds in a fashion people hadn’t seen before. Specifically surprising was that Royce was able to finish fights while seemingly at a disadvantage while laying on his back.

It was soon recognised that BJJ was effective in fights and indispensable from the skillset of a complete fighter. As the sport grew practitioners that wanted to test their skill against each other did not have to resort to UFC fights. They joined local competitions and national competitions, where they faced opponents that were aware of how to fight. With this arose the need to develop attacks that would work against knowledgable opponents, and practitioners soon started exploring the possibilities different rulesets afforded. Without strikes to worry about practitioners were free to experiment with positions that wouldn’t work in a striking scenario. Because of the unreasonable success of this new approach more schools started adopting these techniques, and through this process BJJ developed in a different direction from it’s self defense roots.

Today the Gracies, and many associated schools, keep the self defence origins of BJJ in mind and they try to teach a style that is easy to adapt to strikes. These schools are referred to as the schools teaching the old school style of BJJ, despite the fact that advances have been made in that discipline as well. BJJ Haarlem was originally affiliated with Rickson Gracie, commonly hailed as the best of all the Gracies. Rickson stressed the importance of a dominant, heavy game, with a lot of self defence. As such at our school you will learn a style of BJJ that easily adapts to self defence or MMA, but that is also suitable for modern competition.

Our school was founded around 2006.  Originally housed in Aarts Sport, formely a championship level kickboxing gym, the BJJ crew started off small. Back in those days training was tough, people fought hard and battled constant discomfort. These training conditions crafted a small but dedicated crew. 

Leroy Soesman joined that crew in the later half of 2010. Training at Aarts was great, but it was evident that running a BJJ school inside of another school was a challenge financially and organisationally, often resulting in clashes of opinion. The team would therefore move out of Aarts Sport soon after to teach out of a gym about 4 km North. Around this time the team would suffer the loss of a large number of blue belts that wanted to learn more modern styles of BJJ.  Nelson Palaio  was among the first students to join the team after the exodus. Due to unfamiliarity of the sport in the Netherlands the crew grew slowly it first. It wasn’t until students from a newly founded location in Amsterdam started frequenting the mats that the numbers picked up again. 

This situation lasted for a while, but as soon as the students from Amsterdam got the opportunity to train daily in their home town it became painfully obvious that students from Haarlem were few, and the mats grew quieter. With the head coach forced to dedicate more and more time to his Amsterdam school, Leroy got the opportunity to become an assistant coach as a blue belt around 2016. Right before the Corona pandemic hit Leroy taught regular classes, often teaching both of the classes on offer in Haarlem at the time. After the pandemic he got the opportunity to take over what was left of the school. At that point a total of nine paying members, four of which were active members.

Despite the dwindling numbers of students, and a slight discomfort with being ‘only’ a purple belt at the time, Leroy agreed to take over the school. Knowing how little enthusiasm there had been for BJJ in Haarlem in the past he decided to give himself two years to get the school up and running. 

It took only a few weeks to grow the number of active students from four to thirteen, and it took only a few months to grow that number beyond twenty. The young and rapidly growing team was growing fast and was already too large for the gym. 

As fortune would have it in 2022 local gym Five21 lost their BJJ crew and were looking for replacement. It turns out that multiple independent sources had mentioned Leroy’s name to them. Remembering the time in Aarts Sport Leroy wasn’t eager to accept, but Five21 presented him with the opportunity to grow his team even further with the possibility of multiple classes per week and a mat that was available whenever he needed it.

The team moved into Five21 in September of 2022. That team doubled in numbers that month alone. Leroy couldn’t run all the classes he needed on his own anymore. With plans to offer four classes a week to meet with the growing demand, Nelson came on as an assistant coach to the team. Soon after Leroy would approach blackbelt Jason Steele to become a coach. Jason had moved to the Netherlands from the United States and occasionally trained with the team. With three coaches BJJ Haarlem could now offer multiple classes per week. Jason would teach until December of 2023, when he had to move back to the United States.

Days before his departure he promoted Leroy, who had been a brown belt since late 2021, to blackbelt. Currently the team has been joined by three additional coaches, now offering classes daily in BJJ, Judo and wrestling. The team has dedicated itself to running a tight ship, with coaches that conduct themselves professionally and provide a nice atmosphere that is safe for people to train in. With such a rich past we invite you to become part of our bright future.