The team split that produced New Wave and B Team has been a focal point for the BJJ community for the longest time. While their personal issues aren’t addressed directly, there are also philosophical differences in approach to coaching, teaching and team hierarchy.
And Craig Jones happened to discuss those in the latest podcast episode featuring Lachlan Giles.
“So people I’ve seen, like people I’ve spoken to who went to New Wave, they do like almost an hour of apparently John (Danaher) will teach just techniques for like an hour and and then they’ll do just positional training or no roll.” – Giles started the discussion.
Apparently this class structure is influenced by lack of mat space in the class. Craig Jones went on to say that John Danaher will not let some people train at Roca based just on his dislike of them, regardless of skill level.
Giles went ahead and nixed the gossip concluding: “but every day is basically like a seminar”
Jones provided unique insight as former member of the team: ” That started in Puerto Rico because in New York we would do… So everyone knows this, but class was meant to start at 12, at it’s site at 12:45, you know, and then we do only three for maximum five techniques. And if people haven’t been in this class, he’s pretty succinct as opposed to the length of his instructional. What he says in class could be 100 times shorter than the way he expresses in an instructional.”
“But we would only do a short amount. We do three positions, three regular, and if it was a comp coming up, maybe an extra round at the end”
“Puerto Rico, the rules were completely gone. So like we went back to one session a day, but sometimes we do over 2 hours of technique before we’d roll .”
Jones concluded: “Oh, that was awful.”
And as to how different B team is, Jones added: “I mean the classes will be more much more encouraging, much more self learning. But then like you said, like some people just like seem to be incapable of that.”
Catch the entire episode of the podcast on Apple podcasts.
