Gordon Ryan has recently decided to give fans a sneak-peek at the first official professional class at the brand new Kingsway Jiu-Jitsu headquarters. It’s been a long and difficult path to get to this point, but the most successful no gi competitor in the world has finally opened his own academy. Obviously Ryan has been teaching for quite some time under his coach John Danaher and he’s the top-selling instructional creator around now, but this is a whole new adventure. He hasn’t taken this step alone though of course, as Danaher is alongside him as one of the founders of Kingsway Jiu-Jitsu and there’s a whole staff of other coaches involved too.
This all started with the end of the Danaher Death Squad all the way back in 2021, when Ryan and Danaher decided to stick together with just a handful of other competitors who were training with them in Puerto Rico. They moved to Austin, Texas and gathered together several more elite grapplers over the years to build a formidable team under the New Wave Jiu-Jitsu name. They weren’t able to find an actual facility of their own at the time though, and were training out of the Roka facility instead. This situation remained for several years but finally Ryan announced at the beginning of the year that they were opening their headquarters in 2025.
Things started to move quickly from there, as Ryan and Danaher were putting the wheels in motion to build the facility out and rebrand the team. After a few months, Ryan was able to give the first tour of the Kingsway Jiu-Jitsu headquarters and it looked as though things were almost done. Now just one month after that, the academy is open for their professional team and will be open to the public in just a few weeks. The first class was taken by Ryan himself and several familiar faces like Luke Griffith, Helena Crevar, and Oliver Taza can be seen training.
The full footage of the first pro class at Kingsway Jiu-Jitsu was shared by Gordon Ryan on his official YouTube channel:
