Gym Issues ADCC Conduct Policy: Please Try to Be Good

There's a moment in every gym's trajectory when the owner realizes: we have to put this in writing.

This week, one gym did exactly that. After a teammate got into an altercation at the ADCC World Pro Grappling Championships, the gym issued a formal four-point emergency travel policy. The points are worth reading in full, because point three—"Please try to be good"—is not what you think.

First, context. ADCC is the Olympics of submission grappling. The athletes competing there have trained for months, paid entry fees, traveled internationally, and put their reputation on the line. It's not casual. It's not the UFC. Yet somehow, every year, someone forgets the difference.

The altercation happened after a match. One teammate got into a verbal dispute with an opponent. It escalated into physical contact. Not a spinning backfist—just the kind of weigh-in energy that boils over when adrenaline, ego, and international competition collide. The gym, which had sent multiple competitors to Abu Dhabi, watched this unfold via livestream like everyone else.

What happened next is what matters to every gym owner: reputation damage. Not moral outrage. Business damage. A brawl clip gets edited, dubbed with dramatic music, and recycled on every BJJ outlet for months. FloGrappling doesn't forget. The community doesn't forget. Gym affiliations stick with athlete conduct, fair or not.

So the owner called a meeting.

The resulting four-point policy is a masterclass in institutional exhaustion. Point one: "Athletes representing the gym at major events must maintain professional conduct at all times." This is obvious. So obvious that needing to write it down is already a sign something has broken. But there it is, formalized. Point two: "Disputes with opponents, referees, or event staff must be handled through official channels only." Translation: if you lose a close decision, you don't get a second match in the parking lot. Point four: "Violations may result in suspension from future gym-funded travel." This is the stick—the actual enforcement mechanism.

But point three. Point three is where you see the owner's soul leave their body.

"Please try to be good."

Those four words shouldn't need to exist. They shouldn't. The fact that they do is the entire story of modern gym culture in one sentence fragment.

This isn't unique to this gym. Every major academy has had this moment. Checkingmat had it. Gracie Academy had it. Alliance had it. When you send enough athletes to enough major tournaments, eventually one of them will get into a fight with someone outside the mat, embarrass the team, and force you to write a policy addressing behavior that should be addressed by parenting, but now has to be addressed by an owner with liability insurance.

The deeper issue is what this policy reveals about the power structure of modern grappling. ADCC is an organization. The gym is a satellite. The athlete is the actual problem, but the gym gets the reputation hit. So the gym has to create formal governance—basically gym law—to try to control something they don't actually control: whether a 25-year-old with good arm drags can keep his hands to himself in a high-stress international competition.

For context: Abu Dhabi 2024 had confrontational moments. The 2023 edition had athlete ejections. The 2022 event had post-match drama involving multiple weight classes. This isn't aberration. This is climate. A sport where submission's legal, weight cutting's cultural, where a loss defines your year. That creates high-pressure moments. Some athletes handle them. Some don't. And gyms are now expected to have written policies about which ones will behave.

The real comedy is what the policy doesn't say. It doesn't address why gyms send athletes to ADCC in the first place: prestige. A podium at ADCC elevates your gym's standing, attracts sponsorships, fills your classes, and justifies your coaching credentials. So of course gyms send people. Of course athletes take the risk. Of course a small percentage of them, under international competition pressure, do something they regret.

But the policy assumes this is fixable through formal language. As if point three—"Please try to be good"—will somehow reach the athlete in the adrenaline moment and make them think, "Oh right, the gym gave me a printed policy." It won't. Because the brawl isn't a lack of information. It's a lack of emotional regulation in a sport that actively selects for people who want to win by any means necessary.

Here's the tragedy: it works. Not because athletes read point three and suddenly act professional. The threat of losing gym-funded travel is real. The athlete loses access to the resource (travel money, team support, coaching focus) that enabled the brawl in the first place. So the policy creates a consequence that actually changes behavior. Which means the gym owner did exactly what they had to do—formalize consequences for something that should be obvious—and it actually solves the problem.

That's the state of modern gym culture: explicit, written, often absurd, but necessary. Five years ago, this policy wouldn't have existed. Ten years ago, the gym probably wouldn't have had the budget to fund travel anyway. Now it's standard enough that you need liability protection in the form of a formal code of conduct for people whose job is to solve problems by making them worse (legally).

There's also the unspoken half of point three. "Please try to be good" is a gym owner's way of saying: "I trust you. I invested in you. I sent money so you could represent us on the biggest stage. And I'm asking you, as an adult, to not make me regret that by getting into a fistfight." It's a plea. It's management as disappointment.

The policy will probably work. The athlete will likely compete again, win more matches, and never mention the policy. Or they'll take it as a wake-up call and actually behave like a professional. Or they'll transfer to a gym with fewer resources and no travel fund, at which point the original gym's problem is solved and someone else's begins.

What won't change: a gym in 2026 needing a written policy that says, "Please try to be good." That's not a solution. It's a surrender—admitting you can't control athletes in high-pressure moments, so you control what happens next.

Point three is the saddest sentence in modern jiu-jitsu. Not because it's silly. But because it works.

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

Sources

• ADCC World Pro Grappling Championships - Official Rules and Conduct Policy
• FloGrappling Coverage - ADCC Tournament Incidents and Athlete Conduct