The final coach for the Misfits Teams at the Craig Jones Invitational (CJI) 2 has just been announced, as Greg Souders will be taking charge of Team Misfits Americas. It’s a pretty bold choice by the promotion because Souders is a pretty polarizing figure thanks to some of his more controversial opinions on the sport. He’s undeniably a successful coach though and he’s done some great work as the head of Standard Jiu-Jitsu, so he will definitely have a positive influence on his team. He joins the Australasia coach Lachlan Giles and the Europe coach Faris Ben-Lamkadem, making up quite an impressive lineup.
The full list of competitors and coaches for CJI 2 is still being updated as names are being released, and there’s plenty of spots left. The other coaches will be directly affiliated with the teams they represent though, and Souders has a huge opportunity here to help guide a team of elite competitors he wouldn’t normally have contact with. In his first comments on the appointment, he was clearly excited about the idea:
“It feels great. We’ve made a lot of noise in the last couple of years as a team and gained the invite to coach a bunch of guys that I’ve never coached before. It’s an exciting prospect and I’m looking forward to it.”
Souders is well aware of his controversial standing in the BJJ community though and that came through when he was asked to predict the response to the news:
“I think it’s gonna be mixed. I think a lot of people will be angry but a lot of people will be happy. I think everyone’s gonna be interested regardless.”
The next step for Greg Souders is to select the five competitors he wants to represent Team Misfits Americas at CJI 2 and his first choice was his own student, Deandre Corbe, at under 66kg. That leaves just four more spots and with hundreds of elite grapplers across both North and South America, choosing who fills them is not an easy task. Lachlan Giles has put together a qualifier tournament for two of his open spaces on the Australasia team, so Souders has the option of doing the same. When asked about it, he leaned more towards giving out direct invites himself instead:
“We have so many strong American prospects, I don’t think we need to make them fight each other. We have a long history of what the Americans are capable of at the highest level of competition so I guess we just look at who’s doing the best in a wide range of different rulesets, and we pick the ones that are most appropriate.”
Craig Jones announced the news that Greg Souders was going to be the Team Misfits Americas coach for CJI 2 in a recent video uploaded to the official B-Team Jiu-Jitsu YouTube channel:
