On Sunday June 28th, the ISOHEALTH team rolled into ETSA Park stadium for the 2009 Federation of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu South Australia (FBJJ-SA) State Championships! As one of the committee of the AFBJJ-SA I’d been involved in the planning and setup of the event so I already knew how great the event was going to look, we had the new electronic scoreboards, a great mat area and the stands for the spectators provided a great area for fans, friends, teammates and family members to cheer on the competitors.
 
The ISOHEALTH team stepped up in a major way supplying a huge number of volunteers to make sure scoring and time keeping were covered and I am really thankful to our team members who did step up and volunteer for those rolls because without you the event would have struggled badly. Andrew T, Andrew C, Ash, Ben B, Dale, Israel, Matt N. Thanks guys, you really stepped up! We supplied more than 3 times our quota of event staff and yet you all still worked tirelessly throughout the day to help pick up for the teams that were short on volunteers. Truly AWESOME, you guys are a great example of what sport and martial arts should be all about!
 

The event was a huge success in it’s own right and it was extremely good day for the ISOHEALTH team! Our team all represented themselves in a really good light with excellent sportsmanship even in the face of some situations where people may easily have shown frustration or anger our guys stayed cool and polite, but that’s the nature of the sport, things are going to happen in comps that stress you out but at the end of the day you want to know that you acted in a way that allows you to look yourself in the mirror and be proud of who you are. Anyhow, as for the actual performance on the mat our team performed brilliantly, we came away with 11 Gold medals, 11 Silver medals and 10 Bronze medals!
 
We came 2nd overall in the teams event which is awesome at anytime but especially so given that we’ve only been going for two and a half years and we started completely from scratch. We’re all super happy with our results as they are proof positive that even though we don’t focus on competition we can still put in a very strong competition team (we like to spend time on the self defence side of BJJ but the sport side is also great fun). We had no juvenile competitors either so once we add some kids training to our timetable it will increase our chances of taking that number 1 spot on the Team Cup!

There were a bunch of great highlights from ISOHEALTH team members throughout the day but here are a snapshot of some of them…

• Nick W was fighting up a weight class and sustained a broken nose in his opening match of the gi division, his nose was smashed and the claret flowed hard for a quite a while! Well anyhow, even with his nose smashed the awesome little dude still insisted on stepping up for the NoGi division and in his first round won by submission in just 13 seconds to achieve the fastest submission of the day!!! What a trooper!!!
• Mikey Lim our 58kg dual gold medalist in gi and NoGi stepped up for the Open Weight No-Gi event and met a MONSTER of a bloke in the first round, this guy was well over 100kg and ripped to the bone! I started a chant “Mikey, clap clap clap, Mikey, clap clap clap” and the whole crowd (even people from other teams) got behind him to spur him on against this bloke who was easily one of the most massive dudes of the day. Mikey didn’t manage to win that match but the gold’s he already took in his weight class would have softened that blow LOL!
• Crazy Lachy managed to go through the whole day fighting 3 divisions (gi weight, nogi weight and nogi open weight) without dropping a single point! Yes that’s right, he didn’t drop a point the whole day! He did end up having to forfeit his Open Weight match which left him with Bronze (he had to forfeit due to match scheduling clashing too tightly) but man what a great achievement! Lachy has only been training 12 months but you’d never know it from looking at his comp results!
• Dom won 4 Gold medals from 4 divisions so he can be very pleased with himself, what more can I say?
• We won medals in a huge range of divisions from the lightest of white belts to the heaviest of blue belts

Here are the actual medal results for our ISOHEALTH team for the FBJJ-SA State Championships for 2009, I lost my voice by the end of the day but man it was well worth it!!!
 
ISOHEALTH Team Member Results from 2009 South Australian BJJ State Championships:

GOLD	Lim, Michael	(gi weight class)
GOLD	Vice, Jason	(gi weight class)
GOLD	Conway, Lochlan	(gi weight class)
GOLD	Madigan, Nathan	(gi weight class)
GOLD	Liddle, Dominique	(gi weight class)
GOLD	Lim, Michael	(no-gi weight class)
GOLD	Conway, Lochlan	(no-gi weight class)
GOLD	Conway, Lochlan	(no-gi weight class)
GOLD	Liddle, Dominique	(no-gi weight class)
GOLD	Liddle, Dominique	(gi open weight)
GOLD	Liddle, Dominique	(no-gi open weight)
GOLD	Barr, Lachlan	(no-gi weight class)
SILVER	MacGillvray, Tristan	(gi weight class)
SILVER	Nichols, Ben	(gi weight class)
SILVER	Barr, Lachlan	(gi weight class)
SILVER	Garrett, Damien	(gi weight class)
SILVER	Lawley-Sinclair, Ray	(no-gi weight class)
SILVER	Leondaris, Joshua	(no-gi weight class)
SILVER	Semmens, Nathan	(no-gi weight class)
SILVER	Hilditch, Josh	(no-gi weight class)
SILVER	Vice, Jason	(no-gi weight class)
SILVER	MacGillvray, Tristan	(no-gi weight class)
SILVER	Brewer, Nick	(no-gi weight class)
BRONZE	Lawley-Sinclair, Ray	(gi weight class)
BRONZE	Huntington, Jason	(gi weight class)
BRONZE	Semmens, Nathan	(gi weight class)
BRONZE	Hilditch, Josh	(gi weight class)
BRONZE	Van Blyen, Kieran	(gi weight class)
BRONZE	Brewer, Nick	(gi weight class)
BRONZE	Warne, Nick	(no-gi weight class)
BRONZE	Conway, Lochlan	(no-gi open weight)
BRONZE	Van Blyen, Kieran	(no-gi weight class)
BRONZE	Nichols, Ben	(no-gi weight class)