Team Black
San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Coach Dan Black has been
training fighters since
2003. While he worked early
on out of Cesar Gracie’s
gym, he later broke off in
order to focus more on his
fighters and now trains
fighters out of multiple
locations in order to get
them the training and the
sparring partners that they
need
for each fight. Black’s
philosophy is very
individualized to each
fighter: “I want to give my
guys the best training for
their fights. I’m
one-hundred thousand percent
devoted to my fighters.” His
focus is primarily MMA, and
he will arrange more
intensity in the sports of
boxing, Muay Thai, and BJJ
according to each fighter’s
particular needs.
Black’s background, he says,
is from the “school of hard
knocks.” He grew up in a
rough area in Oakland and
his grandfather was a boxer.
He learned the fundamentals
from age five and visited
various boxing gyms with his
grandfather, who “made me
fight kids in the front
yard.” His fighting drive
was enhanced by being picked
on as a minority during his
youth. This made his
interest in martial arts
later on almost inevitable,
and with his background, it
was easy enough to pick up.
Having had bad
experiences himself as a
fighter, his goal was to
give his team better
coaching, better
opportunities, and better
management. “I primarily
want to look after my
fighters,” says Coach Black.
He runs a “one man army,”
taking the training,
conditioning, management,
and social media entirely
upon himself. Although there
are no assistant
instructors, he does avail
himself of numerous other
gyms to provide training
partners that will hone his
fighters in each component
discipline of MMA. “Having a
single source, keeping it
in-house reduces confusion
on the part of the
athletes.”
Coach
Black describes his training
regimen as “more
rustic”—with a good deal of
running and conditioning and
perhaps more sparring than
is usual. At different gyms,
his fighters get to box with
boxers, kickbox with
kickboxers, and so on. Each
fighter’s routine is
tailored to what he or she
needs for each particular
fight. Black aims to find
skill sets that complement
each fighter’s individual
attributes: “Everybody’s way
different—why would I train
them alike?”
Team
Black boasts a number of
high level fighters:
• Xavier Vigney (9-1 pro
kickboxing; 2-0 pro boxing;
10-1 ama MMA, 1-0 ama
boxing) is ranked 3rd by the
highly popular promotion
GLORY and is as yet
undefeated in this
promotion. After his first
amateur boxing knockout, no
one would fight him as an
amateur; thus, Vigney went
pro. This giant stands at
6’8” and weighs 260 pounds
and has just been offered a
spot by K1 Grand Prix.
• Matt Baker, fighting at
-85 kg, has won a number of
titles, including the gold
at the WKA 2013 North
American Championships and
at the WKA Unified World
Championships the same year.
He also won the gold at IFMA
in Russia in 2012 and the
bronze in Malaysia in 2014.
After achieving a stunning
amateur record of 19-5,
Baker turned pro and won his
GLORY debut in Vegas this
summer.
• Nick Pica, fighting MMA at
-185 lb., has a record of
4-0, with two wins by KO and
two by submission. Black
describes him as a “freak
athlete”—meaning this as a
compliment to Pica’s KO
power in both hands. A
purple belt, Pica has won a
submission-only tournament
and can also boast a
background as a wrestling
champion.
• Brooke Mayo is described
by Coach Black as his best
amateur fighter at the
moment. She fights MMA at
-125 lb. and is 5-2, with
four knockout wins. She is
also 3-0 in kickboxing with
another win coming by way of
KO. She won this year’s Muay
Thai Open tournament in
Phoenix.
• Roy Boughton, a BJJ brown
belt and prominent wrestler,
has fought on both GLORY and
Bellator at -205 lb. He is
9-2 in kickboxing and 12-5
in MMA.
Coach Black
is thankful for his many
sponsors, including DC Solar
and Delta Tactical Training
Group. These sponsors
provide much support to Team
Black, as do Strike First
Nutrition, Action Pro Gear,
Lana’s Egg Whites, Kinders
BBQ, Xternal, Stone Rum, and
Lumpy’s Diner.
Team
Black embraces the
old-school boxing mindset
that if you want to be good,
you take the beatings, come
back, and put in the work.
Coach Dan’s words of wisdom
for fighters: “Stay humble,
stay hungry, work hard.”
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