Craig Jones's B-Team Resort Play Is Exactly Where Elite Grappling Was Always Heading

Craig Jones gave the first official tour of B-Team Jiu-Jitsu's new Zamaya Resort property in Tulum, Mexico, on September 17, and somewhere in a garage in Des Moines a guy named Todd just realized his entire business model has been wrong for twelve years.

Zamaya isn't a gym. It's not even technically a training camp in the old sense—the "fly to Rio for a week, sleep four to a room, train twice a day, eat rice and beans, come back broke but skilled" model that produced most of the grapplers under forty right now. Zamaya is a resort with a state-of-the-art training facility. Air conditioning. Multiple mats. Beachfront rooms. The kind of place where a competitor can wake up, train three hours, do recovery protocol in the afternoon, roll light in the evening, then walk to the beach instead of back to a hostel with questionable plumbing.

This isn't revolutionary—it's inevitable. And it's the final nail in the coffin of the "I trained in a converted warehouse and so can you" era of jiu-jitsu.

Craig Jones has positioned B-Team as the thinking person's elite gym. Not the lineage gym. Not the historic gym. The gym where the athlete experience is as engineered as the curriculum. Where your recovery matters as much as your drilling. Where you're not training harder—you're training smarter, and the infrastructure proves it.

Zamaya isn't Craig's first play in this direction. B-Team's home base in Austin has been a masterclass in modern gym ownership: clean, professional, structured, no bullshit. But a resort facility changes the equation. Now elite grapplers don't have to choose between training at a elite facility and living like a broke student-athlete. Now they can bring their families. Now they can combine a training camp with what looks suspiciously like a vacation.

The market noticed. Floyd Mayweather figured this out with his Las Vegas training compound. CrossFit gyms started adding hospitality. High-level strength coaches began offering destination training retreats. The formula works: elite + comfort + convenience = premium pricing + loyal clients + the infrastructure to produce champions.

What's interesting about B-Team's version is that Jones isn't positioning this as a resort that happens to have jiu-jitsu. He's positioning it as a training facility that happens to be in a resort. The distinction matters. The curriculum is serious. The partners are serious (B-Team has pulled talent like Dillion Danis, Andrew Wiltse, and a rotating cast of elite no-gi grapplers). The results matter. But the client experience has been elevated from "you paid money to suffer" to "you paid money for a complete service."

Here's where it gets real: this model is going to force gyms that aren't in a position to offer it to get very honest about what they actually provide. A lot of gyms operate on the assumption that exclusivity and historical reputation are sufficient. That lineage carries weight. That training hard in a cramped space builds character. Maybe it does. But it doesn't compete with training hard in a place where your shoulder doesn't have to recover between rolls because you're icing it in saltwater.

The Zamaya move also signals something deeper about how elite grappling is stratifying. There's already a tier system: local gyms where people train because it's convenient, regional powerhouses where people train to be competitive at a high level, and now a new tier—destination academies where the entire experience is optimized around producing elite competitors. You don't move to Austin anymore if you want to train B-Team. You book a training camp at Zamaya. Or you book regular camps. Or you attend their annual tournament. The gym becomes a brand ecosystem, not just a place with mats.

Craig Jones has been building toward this for years. A few observations about why it works for him specifically:

First, B-Team's brand is built on legitimacy, not mystique. Jones competes at the highest level himself. He's not a retired coach trading on past glory. He's not an Instagram personality who bought a gym. He's an active, elite no-gi grappler who runs a gym as an athlete, by athletes. That's a selling point. People want to learn from someone still in the fight.

Second, B-Team has been positioned as the intellectual antithesis to the "just be tough" gym. It's technical, systematic, analytical. The kind of place where a 30-year-old returning competitor or a serious hobbyist feels at home, not out of place. Zamaya extends that brand: we're serious about your development, and we're serious about your comfort. Both matter. Neither is a compromise.

Third, location. Tulum is already a destination. You've got a built-in audience of people who were going to Mexico anyway. The beach, the food, the surrounding culture—these are draws. The gym is the reason to book the week-long trip, but the resort experience is why you stay longer and tell your friends.

The timing is worth noting too. The grappling calendar is getting tighter and more visible. ADCC is mainstream now. Submission Underground, OneFC, Hype tournaments—there are more high-level competitions, more opportunities to train at elite level, more incentive to make a training camp investment. A serious competitor might do three to five dedicated training blocks a year. If B-Team can capture one of those blocks at Zamaya, that's significant revenue and significant athlete development.

Now, the skeptical take: this works if the training is actually elite and the facility actually delivers. There are already plenty of expensive gyms and resorts that look great in photos but don't produce results. B-Team's brand depends on the next few Zamaya cohorts producing visible improvements in its athletes' competition results. If people train there for a week and don't see measurable progress, it's just an expensive beach trip.

Also, the accessibility question. This model is not for the average practitioner. It's not for the person grinding at a garage gym, working a day job, raising a family. It's for the athlete serious enough to book a training camp, wealthy enough to afford resort pricing, and privileged enough to have the time. B-Team's home gym probably democratizes elite instruction more than the resort ever will. But the resort is where the brand goes mainstream, and where the elite athletes develop the edge that filters down to the home gym eventually.

What Zamaya represents is the professionalization of grappling at every level. Not just the training—the entire athlete experience. Recovery science, nutrition coaching, facility design, hospitality—these are now table stakes at the elite end. The gyms that can't offer them are functionally lower tier, no matter how much history they carry.

For Craig Jones specifically, this is a power move. He's no longer just coaching. He's building an athlete development ecosystem. Home gym, competition team, destination training facility, tournament series (B-Team hosts events), content (B-Team has social reach). That's a brand. That's leverage. That's the next iteration of what a gym actually is.

The garage era of elite grappling is over. Welcome to the resort era. And if your gym doesn't have a plan for that shift, you're already behind.

This post was generated by AI. Sources are linked below. Follow @bjj-problems on YouTube for the weekly video digest.

Sources

• B-Team Jiu-Jitsu and Craig Jones Competition Record
• Zamaya Resort and B-Team Partnership Announcement