Hunter Olsen practicing his kickboxing technique. He says he plans to transition to muay-thai and hopes to go pro.
It was a maelstrom of mayhem on the 18th of March at Lethbridge College.
For the first time in its history, the Lethbridge College hosted a mixed martial arts event.
The Branded Fighting Championship featured twelve fights from amateur fighters in and around southern Alberta.
The event was organized by the Progressive Fighting Academy (PFA) and saw fighters duking it out in Lethbridge College’s Val Matteotti gymnasium.
Mixed martial arts, otherwise known as MMA, isn’t very big in Lethbridge, but it has been growing in popularity in the last few years.
Hunter Olsen, a kickboxer at the PFA, says his dad was a huge inspiration in why he took up fighting.
“I started training when I pretty much first could walk with my dad, Junior Olsen, in the Crowsnest Pass with Olsen’s martial arts club. I grew up doing that and then kind of started playing school sports as I got into high school, started coming down to PFA about six months ago. I trained for a solid, four or five months on end,” he said.
Olsen’s father founded the Lethbridge Fighting Academy in the early 1990s, which would later become the Progressive Fighting Academy under Brad Wall.
According to Olsen, since then the PFA has become one of the top academies in southern Alberta
While the MMA event went well at the college, it wasn’t without hard work from the staff running the event.
Tristan Tucket, game day director of the MMA event, says there were a lot of unknown elements going into this event but the planning they did paid off.
“There’s days of planning. We started with many meetings months ago. I had many meetings with the organizers and then internally, our own team spends most of this week preparing, discussing how to do these things, and then even by the time it comes to set up day, there’s so much going on. Things are changing things we expected. So it’s all the way up until pretty much the doors open when we’re still planning it,” Tucket said.
Olsen, while he didn’t participate due to an injury at the time, had his brother in the ring and says he hopes to fight in the College in the future.
“I hope so, it was absolutely wicked to be able to, fight in front of mostly a student crowd and our friends there and everything. I’m a student myself, so being able to get out in front of the hometown crowd was absolutely awesome and I look forward to events in the future,” Olsen said.
The event was broadcasted online, but also had an in-house audience with crowds nearing full capacity.
Tuckett says he didn’t have huge expectations running the event but learned a lot along the way.
“I don’t think I had any real expectations as the first one. We’re always just trying to get through it, find a way to learn, learn the things that we haven’t done before. This is definitely one. There’s a lot of different angles. It’s much different than a lot of the things we run normally, like convocation and things like that, a lot of moving parts in this but I think it went well.”
Tuckett says there’s a good chance the college will make this event an annual occurrence, which is something Olsen hopes for.
“You know what? It’s getting bigger and bigger as far as I can tell, every single year we got more and more people coming down to PFA, it seems to be a lot of people are wanting to get into fighting. You know the UFC cards are as big as they’ve ever been. One Championship is getting huge right now as well, and I can see Lethbridge putting out a ton of future athletes here in the MMA fight game,” Olsen said.
Olsen says if Lethbridge College ever made an MMA team, he could never leave PFA but would love to see more people coming out to train and compete.