What was your childhood like?

I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been born and raised in Hawaii. It's such a melting pot. I’m nine different ethnicities, and that's very common in Hawaii. It's very common to grow up with so many different cultures around you.

And one thing I really love that I was exposed to very young is that I have a deep appreciation for nature. I mean, how can you not appreciate nature growing up and playing in Hawaii when you have waterfalls, and mountains, and you have some of the most gorgeous beaches in the world?

But by the time I was a teenager I realized that the world was a very big place. And that Hawaii was very small in comparison.

It wasn't until I graduated high school that I knew I was destined for something bigger, and that I wouldn't accomplish what I wanted to unless I left. But now as an adult going back, I think I love it and appreciate it more than I ever did as a child.

What were you most interested in growing up? Did you you start grappling as a kid?

No, actually I got thrown into sports probably as a means for childcare for my mom.

I was horrible at them though. And so what I really liked doing as a kid? I really liked writing. I went to a kind of alternative, hippie school for a brief period of time. And while I was there, I got into things like directing the play for the Christmas show, and I did a contest writing the script. I really liked theater and art.

That was more of what I was into; my sister was actually the jock, not me. But I did like playing goalie. That was the only thing I really liked was getting to jump all over the place and fall on the ground (laughs).

But other than that I was definitely not an athletic person as a child, or as an adult.

Have you done any writing since then? 

I’m kind of a writer here and there.

I’ve never had much of an interest in doing it as far as a career goes, but I write for the Girls in Gis blog, and I've written for a couple other Jiu-Jitsu publications. I’ve had my own blog for a while also, but I haven't kept up with it for about eight years or so because once I started doing Girls in Gis all my energy was directed towards that. 

But I do still enjoy writing.

And you enjoy photography as well, right?

Yes. Yeah, that passion came when I was in high school. It was kind of a blow-off class in high school, actually. And lo-and-behold, I fell in love with it. And so that was my very first passion that I was really interested in. I pursued it as a career and went to college at Marymount in Los Angeles for it.

What are your feelings towards Jiu-Jitsu in relation to creative arts like photography and writing?

I definitely think that Jiu-Jitsu has that same creative outlet. You know, when you look at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu as a whole…it's an evolution, it's an interpretation. 

A lot of people I know call open mat their ‘lab’ where they go in and experiment. You look at everything that we do, and it's an evolution of people playing with what works, with what doesn't work. And I like to say in Jiu-Jitsu that there is nothing that you can do wrong. There are just things that work better than others. It's a matter of anatomy and body mechanics.

But I think—for everybody—whether they are creative or not, there is definitely a sense of artistic expression in Jiu-Jitsu. Because you can cater it to yourself in so many different ways.

So after graduating from Marymount, were you a practicing photographer up until you began your work with Girls in Gis?

Yes, I was predominantly a photographer. That's how I was able to transition and take on doing Girls in Gis. I had the time and flexibility running my own business to where I could take this on as a kind of hobby at first. But eventually Girls in Gis became something that, you know, could take the front seat, and my photography has kind of taken the backseat ever since. But that's not the first time in my life that my photography kind of comes in and out, and I know that photography is something for me that is always going to be a part of my life. It’s just not my primary focus right now.

And when did you first start training Jiu-Jitsu?

So I started training in 2003.

But ever since I was about 15—I think it was ’96—I was friends with these guys who were older, and they had discovered Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu through Relson Gracie when they were in Hawaii.

And so I remember being in high school and dropping my friends off at their Jiu-Jitsu class. And just being like, “See you guys later. This isn’t my thing.” And they’d always say back, “You should do Jiu-Jitsu, you should do Jiu-Jitsu.” Because I was always kind of a tomboy, and I'd like to play wrestle.

But I had no idea what the heck I was doing. And at the same time too, I was never interested in martial arts.

So it wasn't until my friend’s girlfriend asked me—my friend had succeeding in getting her involved in it—that I began training. 

She’d started a women's class in 2003 and asked me, “Just come and support me, I just need to have bodies on the mat. Just come as a friend.”

And so I did. And for me, it was like the beginning of the end. I got hooked instantly.

And from there, how did the idea for Girls in Gis end up coming about?

So Girls in Gis was actually started by Ashley Freeman. She is the founder of Girls in Gis. And she started it as a project for a leadership program that she was doing.

She thought it would be a really good idea to get more women training together, and it would be a really good leadership opportunity for women in general.

It was kind of just like a homework assignment essentially—this program—which I was a part of. And I came in as a participant about three or four events in.

It just became this thing where all the girls on my team would jump in a car, and we’d all drive wherever there was an event going on. We’d drive all over Texas going to these things whenever they were happening.

And on the way home, we would always be like, “Oh, that was a really good event. But this…but that…”

There was no governing body. There was no structure, there was no organization to it. It was very informal. There were things going on—like instructors jumping on and off the mat, guys were teaching, etc.

And it just began to kind of stray away from what Ashley had started. So at that point, Ashley kind of started moving on. She was married and had two kids by that time, and so she focused more on that.

But I had really seen the potential and what Girls in Gis could be. And because I was working as a photographer, I had the flexibility of really kind of organizing it all. and I love to organize and structure things. So that's where my strengths came in. I really built up the Girls in Gis organization from being a small informal group in Texas into the nationwide organization it is right now.

And what did you do to turn Girls in Gis into the nationwide organization it is today?

So as a photographer, I try to combine my passion for Jiu-Jitsu with my photography whenever I can. And so I was just going out and shooting at tournaments in the area at that time. Still just doing our informal Texas training sessions.

So my friend Seth Daniels, who now runs Fight to Win, had told me that I should come up to Colorado a do a Girls in Gis event there. But I had no money to do that. Girls in Gis wasn’t generating any cash. And I’d been dumping everything I had into it already as it was.

So Seth says, “Come photograph a tournament up here. I’ll pay you to photograph the tournament and you can stay with me.

So our very first event was in Colorado. And I was really hesitant at first. Like, Colorado? I hadn’t thought it would be too big on Jiu-Jitsu. But I was proven wrong because we opened up registration and we had over 100 women and girls who signed up for the event.

Then comes the day of the tournament I was photographing, it was beautiful. It was like 70 degrees.

But then the day of our event, it was a blizzard.

And coming from Hawaii, I've never had to deal with a blizzard. I’d never even been through a blizzard. And so out of the 100 women who’d signed up, we only had about 30 or so that showed up. But I was like, “Well, I'm already here. Let's do this.”

And so that was the very first event for Girls in Gis outside of Texas. A couple months later though, we came back and did a repeat event. And that's when we ended up having about 100 women come out for that one. 

So from then to now…all the seminars you now host—averaging about three a month around the country—how do you juggle them all?

I do travel to quite a few of them, but not all. I'm traveling maybe one to three weekends every month.

Now, Ashley had a great idea, and it still is to this day what it was always intended to be—ultimately, Girls in Gis is a leadership program. And so Girls in Gis is run by different—what we call—ambassadors.

Ambassadors are not just your typical volunteers selling products at our events; that isn't their objective. Our ambassadors are women who have already taken on leadership roles in their communities, or women who have a desire to do so. And Girls in Gis gives them that opportunity to take on that leadership role in running our chapters.

We actually just opened up our 11th chapter recently in Georgia. Our ambassadors really are the heart and soul of what makes Girls in Gis possible, because they're the ones that are there on the ground making these events happen. And each chapter has events anywhere between once a month and once a quarter annually. 

And each chapter operates independently?

They do, but I still do all the back end. So I do still do the logistics for all the events. I'm the one finding the guest instructors that are teaching at the events, coordinating with the academies, coordinating with the ambassador’s. So I’m still very heavily involved on the back end, but come the day of—it’s these women who are all making it happen.

Do you have any other programs as well?

Well, they say the joke is that there's no money in Jiu-Jitsu. And sadly it's kind of true.

For those who really want to compete, for instance, it's really hard to dedicate your time and energy to being a full time competitor because a lot of companies that offer sponsorships are doing it with the intent of providing you with uniforms or merchandise only, not so much for the means to travel, or for the entry fees needed to compete.

And so that’s one of the reasons we designed the Girls in Gis scholarship program, which is something that's very near and dear to my heart. Because I've always struggled with wanting to be a full-time competitor prior to taking on Girls in Gis, but not having enough money to do so. It’s very tough to make that balance. 

So the first of the three parts to our scholarship program provides women with uniforms. We've partnered with several different companies—like War Tribe, Fuji, E Nois. And it was actually E Nois that helped kickstart this part of the scholarship program—where we started giving gis to girls that may not have a gi, or maybe they compete often and only have one gi, or maybe the one they own is falling apart.

Then the second part of the scholarship program is that we provide tuition assistance. A lot of times the number one response you hear people say as to why they can’t train is because they don’t have the money. So what we do is, we pay for your tuition for a set amount of time. Now, if you’re training already and you suddenly lose your job or something like that, the tuition assistance initiative can help you there as well.

The third part of the scholarship program comes in for competitors through donations. And through our partnerships with big companies like War Tribe and Fuji who have greatly helped us to expand these programs, we are able to provide not only entry fees for competitors, but also help with accommodations for transportation and travel to these tournaments as well.

Through the three parts of our scholarship program, we have offered assistance to women and girls around the world.

What goals do you have for Girls in Gis in the future?

So the big push right now that we are moving forward with is twofold.

The first part is providing black belts with an opportunity to get paid to teach at our events. And the second is training women who have never taught before how to become instructors themselves.

Our events have prominently been women's only events prior to now. We've only done a couple co-ed events, and that's something that we definitely want to do more of.

Emily Kwok did an event with us in New Jersey actually, and she said something that really stuck with me. She said, “I want to normalize women as instructors.”

And I couldn't agree with her more, because I think that when women do get teaching opportunities they’re typically opportunities to teach children and other women. And I think that we need to normalize it to where women are teaching men as well.

So that's something that, through our co-ed events and other opportunities that we're exploring, we really want to move forward with.

The other thing that we really want to move forward with as well is women getting equal pay as instructors—as far as being everyday instructors in academies, and as far as being instructors at seminars.

And those are two things that, through various different programs that we're going to be starting off in 2019, we hope to accomplish through Girls in Gis.