Duane ‘Bang’ Ludwig won the World MMA Awards Coach of the Year in 2013, and led Team Alpha Male to the Gym of the Year award. However, in 2014 he left. And in 2015, then UFC bantamweight champion T.J. Dillashaw joined Ludwig at Elevation Training Center. TAM’s Cody Garbrandt was not impressed and has more or less bickered with Dillashaw ever since. The pair finally fight on Saturday night at UFC 217, with Garbrandt now the title holder
TAM suffered some tough losses late in 2015, with owner Urijah Faber beating Frankie Saenz, but Paige VanZant, Chad Mendes, and Lance Palmer all losing. However, new head coach Justin Buchholz came on board and there was a turnaround, capped by Garbrandt becoming bantamweight champion.
Earlier this week, Buchholz announced on his ” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer”>Stud Radio podcast that he was no longer the head coach, and added on his social network that he didn’t understand why.
https://twitter.com/JustinBuchholz/status/924450422340939776
I went to Alaska [to fight] and I came back and a lot of things have changed,” said Buchholz, as transcribed by IFL Fighting. “It’s been changing actually since we moved to the new gym [4 months ago]. A lot of things changed. I had a system that I put in place last year that I was in charge of and I stuck to and made things happen and we have gone to a different system.
Urijah explained it to me that there are five head coaches, everyone is like a head coach but I am no longer a head coach, I run the Muay Thai program. It’s a changing of roles but I will do continue to work within the Muay Thai position and train world champions. For the team in general I am not running the MMA practices anymore. Urijah and Danny Castillo, Chris Holdsworth, they change days and stuff I’m not really sure [who is running the MMA practices].”
When I took over the program [in December 2015] it was in terrible shape. We had 4 fights and we went 1-3 and had a disastrous end to the year. We weren’t used to taking these losses. T.J. had left the team and Duane had left, Joe [Benavidez] had left. We had Martin Kampmann as head coach for about a year, but by the end of the year a mitt holder guy was brought in and then a guy named Dom who ended up cornering Paige and Paige kneed him in the nose and he got a bloody nose and he handed the mitts to Lance [Palmer] to mitt down Paige before she fought Rose Namajunas. He’s at Xtreme Couture now as a member.”
That’s when I took over the program. I said, ‘Hey I’m gonna be coach’ and I put everyone in a position. I put Danny Castillo, who I think was in Colorado at the time, I told him be the wrestling coach, Chris [Holdsworth] as the jiu-jitsu coach, Joey [Rodriguez] was the boxing coach, Master Thong was the Muay Thai coach and I was the MMA coach, the head coach.
The media was coming down on us, saying that we were done, TJ had taken the title and Duane had done everything for us. I said f*** that, you know I’ve been here for 10 years. I have over 100 corners in the UFC, over 100. I’ve actually spent four months of my life living at MGM Grand with all the fight weeks I’ve cornered.
I took it on by storm. I changed up the program, I was in charge there. Urijah was fighting, we had a successful comeback as a team when we were written off by a lot of people. It’s easy to forget when we were in a hardship and what we accomplished as a team and what I accomplished as a head coach in 2016. It hasn’t really been done by anyone else. I really understood where I was at and what I had accomplished as a head coach on December 30th when Cody won the title. It was a good year.
I’ll support from the MMA striking coach, training fighters individually too – in charge of camps and strategy for certain fighters that I work with and doing what I always do, putting my heart and soul out there and it’s the same thing I did for f***ing ten years for the team.
I really saw what it takes to make a fighter win and what makes a fighter lose…it’s a two-part thing, you need to understand as a fighter you will not find anything outside of yourself that will take you to the top of the sport. It’s all within you. The second thing is find a f***ing good coach.
