If you ever wondered how Matrix Saarbrücken came to life, this is the article you've been searching for. I'll write shortly, yet won't spare the major events from the beginning that led to a grappling fellowship, from which the best submission wrestling gym in Saarbrücken was born!
2014, 1th December, Pfalz Grappling Challenge is a local low level grappling competition and one of my first competitions back in the days. Despite my pretty much numb right arm from a spinal disc herniation, which was about to be finally diagnosed couple of days later (click to read full story), I decided to give enroll anyway. It was this competition back then, where I cognitively perceived both Matrix Brasilian Jiu Jitsu and Alexander Neufang. I fought two guys from team Matrix, yet what impressed me was not only the way they fought, it was their motivation and how they build up a big team and went all together in a competition. While, as usual, I was all alone at this 100 km distant competition and no one out of my team bothered to fight or come to watch at all, I had plenty of free perception wange to perceive new things. What got me even more excited was that after a chat with Chris it turned out that they are just 70 km away from my town. So a simple calculation that if they have 3 guys fighting in my weight division (Andy, Chris, Robert), there will be plenty of other guys at my weight class at their gym, which made it a potentially perfect open mat destination. Unlike most of my miscalculations, this one turned out to be much better than preanticipated!
Somewhere along the competition there was a huge anabolic ~120 kg black guy, which I couldn't miss to anticipate roaring and stomping around the hall. So at some point of a time I saw this huge specimen in a midst of a fight against some tall and skinny guy. The monster was on top and squeezed the shit out of the little fella downstairs. If someone did that to me back then I would have become crippled for a lifespan. Yet out of nowhere, the genie came out of the smashed bottle and locked a triangle. Total silence. By the way I was at the other corner of the hall watching with compassion through a crack between other people. What I saw then, my eyes couldn't believe. The huge Hulk hand tapped! The monster was slayed! What the fuck?! The whole hall exploded. I was so impressed that after the mixture of screams and applauds I went on to shake this guy hand and congratulate him. His name was Alexander Neufang. Who would've thought, what the years to come will bring us?
So yeah, at the beginning of 2015 I went on to see this Matrix BJJ in Kaiserslautern and met, among all, Renè Becker - the first guy that took actively care of my grappling skill development. I had a great sparring there, got to know the guys and so on. Besides that I just graduated as master of computer science and was looking for a job. I wrote my thesis at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Saarbrücken and worked as a part time software developer there too. Yet after my gradiation there was no available job offer from there, but luckily there was a DFKI branch in Kaiserslautern that was offering multiple researcher positions and I was hired there. So my Matrix visits slowly increased from 1 per 2 months through 2 per week to 1 in 2 days and substituted totally my previous gym, which was btw closed for a month, in the days around Road to ADCC Germany 1 in 2016. Couple of months later leading to Road to ADCC Germany 3 same picture. Old gym closed for a month, while I had to prepare for the fight of my life against ADCC South America winner and 2nd degree black belt Leozada Nogueira and UFC TUF trialist Sascha Sharma. It is the point when I decided to unsubscribe from my former gym and go on my own. Btw, I somehow won and this is one of my milestole tournament wins, which put my name into peoples mouth from then on (read full article Road to ADCC Germany). It was so shocking that even the organized super fights later on got less attention, one of which was Alexander Neufang tapping out Daniel Brauchle in a gi.
Speaking of which, at Submissao 2015 just couple of months later of PGC, Alexander tapped the then perceived as invincible and previous multiple time champion Benny Russ with a crazy reversed inverted back triangle. Again the whole hall exploded and I went on to shake his hand for a second time. This time I already knew that this is this Alex, whom I've heard of and by matter of circumstance, living in the same city as me! So yeah, competitions went on and as always Alex was pretty much the lone warrior accompanied rarely by some of his friends. So despite us being in the two rival schools, we slowly stated going to competitions together and to Matrix BJJ open mats. One think you should know about Alex is that he is a total BJJ maniac. He went on fighting hundrets of fights in whole europe with no driving license, money and anything. As a real maniac he had devoted one of his 3 rooms in his shared flat to put on a puzzle mats to be able train 24/7. So we sparred there, went to competitions, open mats, training camps, even fought against each other once at Matrix Open :D
During all this time Alex was constantly experiencing pressure from his former "coach", whom I put in "" due to his total lack of BJJ understanding and incapability leading a martial arts academy in a respectful way towards "his" students. You might notice I am putting years of frustration and game changing stories into a single sentence, but yeah Alex's situation at his home turf was literally fucked up. I'll keep shortening up for a while, starting with Alex meeting Raffaela, who finally joined our pact of putting straight thoughts into Alex's head and convinced him to leave his old shithole, through Alex leaving his flat with the mats and to even demoting himself to a whitebelt! Bottomline is that Alex had no mat space anymore, so if we wanted to train, we had to do the 1 hour ride to Kaiserslautern, while at same time we dreamed to open our own martial arts academy!
In late 2017 I made the decision for myself to pursue opening an academy at all cost and was looking actively for room to rent. After failing to find anything even partially usable, a friend of mine at the climbing gym told me about a place, where I could ask. Without a hesitation I immediately took the phone and got an appointment. What I saw then was a room full of potential. This was dreamlike combined with perfect pricing and it resides in a fitness gym with showers, sauna and boxing room! Totally psyched I gathered the usual suspects Alex, Rene, Andy and Raffaela. Turned out none of them was even a bit less psyched than me and the only question in the air was - what do we need to do and how? I'll spare you the exact details of the building process, yet leave you with a video of the building process having visually shown the same plot as this plot starting off our unforgettable sessions with Alex and our bondage with Matrix BJJ, through our whole building process and finally our grand opening.
This video shows it all - a dream that came true!
Can you imagine what the first roll in your about to be opened gym is like?!
There are so many people I have to thank at the end of the line that if I do so this article will become at least twice as long. That's why, if you read this article you are most likely one of them, so THANK YOU! :)