John Danaher has been lauded as one of the greatest BJJ coaches in the history of the sport for quite some time now, and yet he hasn’t actually been able to produce a female champion in the sport at the time of writing. This might seem unusual to some, but not every coach has been able to produce champions in both the male and female divisions. Danaher has been vocal in giving fantastic advice to female competitors in the past though, so naturally the question came up in a recent interview with Jiujiteira magazine. He was asked why he hasn’t produced a female champion yet and the legendary coach gave an in-depth answer:
“On the face of it, one of the great failures of my career, thus far, is that I’ve never produced a female champion. And it’s natural to ask me: “Why?” Part of the answer is that I never engage into recruiting; I never actively “pull” people to the gym… I open the door and whoever comes, I teach. So, it tends to be a self-selected group of people that I teach. And the door is open two ways; to walk in and to walk out, and a lot of people walk out. My teaching style isn’t for everybody. Some people like it, some people don’t.”
Just because John Danaher has yet to produce a female champion, that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have any female students. Of course, Nathalia Santoro is one of his most famous female students and she’s been training under him long enough to be promoted to brown belt. Danaher did also address this, explaining that he does not force any of his students to compete if they do not want to:
“In the gym itself, there is a pretty high number of females. But I never push people to compete. I was never the coach that would say: “Hey man, you’re good! You gotta go out and compete.” I’ve literally never said that. I never recruit and I never tell people they have to compete. And so what happens is that the people who compete, always do so by their own volition. So, I do have many female students. Some of them do compete, but I don’t actively push them to compete.”
The interview with John Danaher where he explains why he hasn’t produced a female champion yet was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of Jiujiteira Magazine:
