Mike Voss

I had never heard of it before and as far as I could tell it was a lot like wrestling. I asked my son if he would like to try it, he said yes and I took him to his first class and he asked if he could keep going so we signed him up. The kids class was right before the adult class and the other dads and adults started asking if I was going to stay and try a class myself, I said no for a few weeks because I just didn’t see myself getting into this weird pajama wrestling. After a couple weeks of watching my son and watching the beginning of the adults class I finally said “ok im going to stay after my sons class and give it a shot.”

That was it! After that class, after being manhandled and submitted by people that were much smaller than me, people you wouldn’t look at and think “they look tough” I told myself I had to learn this.

Eventually my son and I started doing competitions together and doing rather well. My wife said she would never roll around on the ground with grown people (which I came to realize is a big reason people never even start this journey), somewhere around my purple belt our instructor moved on from this karate dojo and I stepped in to teach a beginners class, finally my wife ended up coming to try it…and then even competed and got double gold, alongside me and my son (which was a proud moment for me).

As time went on, we parted ways with the dojo and I went out searching for a new school that I could fit into, I even got into judo for a while. After visiting many schools, me and a small group of people started training at our houses, we had mats in our basements and garages and would get together train, this time was the most impactful on my learning because we really dived into techniques and really studied, drilled, rolled and explored this game. This group was awesome and we became Oddball, you can see this journey on Instagram @oddballjj.

I went to as many seminars as I could and traveled all over to train with as many people as I could. During that time, I contacted Kevin Sheridan, Kevin is a black belt under Fabio Clemente (which was Alliance NYC at the time).

He had visited one of our classes at the karate dojo, I asked him if it was possible to visit his school, Sheridan BJJ, in New Jersey and he said absolutely. So a few of us did, we went down, slept on the mats in his school and trained with a lot of awesome people. I loved the culture Kevin had grown in his school and I wanted to be a part. We went down to Kevins a lot and eventually we were invited under his flag!

I went on to receive my brown belt from Kevin after a couple years and my black belt from Kevin about 5 years later!

This is when I really started thinking about opening my own school where I could build the culture up in the way that I’d grown to love at Kevins. Timing and money just didn’t line up, I visited another school and was honored to be invited in as a coach to a great group of people at Alchemy.

After 4 or 5 years with Alchemy, my neighbor asked if id want to teach a group of people BJJ at a boxing gym in town that he had opened, so I did.

After class one day we were talking, it came up that id like to have a bigger place that we could actually have full size classes, one of the students just happened to hear us talking and said “hey my brother has a big building maybe we could talk to him” And Upper Level came to be!