“Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard”-- Tim Notke The decision to withdraw from cornering Neil is something that I struggled with greatly. As a coach, I always want to help my students be the best fighters that they can be and I do my best to make myself available for extra sessions in case they are unable to make a scheduled practice. I’ve been coaching for a number of years and developed a system that has produced five champions through various Michigan promotions within 3 years. An eight week fight camp is standard for professional MMA and I expect my fighters to at least make 80% of the team practices during the camp. I understand that fighters have lives too, but when a fighter only makes it to a handful of practices halfway through the camp, I have to re-evaluate my investment. I invest numerous hours researching my fighter’s opponents before the camp even begins and I spend time developing a fight plan for each fighter to work through during the camp. Conducting the fight camps requires sacrifice all around—I’m leaving my family to work late hours and the fighters are making sacrifices in their own lives as well in order to be available to help each other practice during the camp. Unfortunately, it got to the point where I could not in good conscience continue to require Neil’s teammates to show up to practices that were catered around his schedule only to have him show up excessively late, if he even bothered to show up at all. At the end of the day, it wasn’t fair to anyone involved. That being said, I expected that Neil would find a random place to train at in the 11th hour. Kory is a former student of mine and he has a skillset that will ensure that Neil has his hands full on Saturday. I don’t believe in half assing when it comes to training and I wasn’t willing to try to cram eight weeks of training into three weeks. I wish Neil the best of luck training at a place that doesn’t have a MMA team nor experience working with UFC caliber fighters like I do.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 00:58:35 +0000
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