Hey everyone... Mike Hauben here.. a couple of you may remember me from the no-gi classes.. I joined Soca's after moving back from Florida, but only stayed with the academy for a couple of months because of financial issues and a death in the family. I'll be signing back up this coming week, so I cant wait to see you guys there (including Gi classes, now that I have a gi - my old training bag was stolen).

My question is this... I trained under Matt Serra for about four years.. then trained submission grappling with American Top Team for a year... I never used a striped belt system with Serra, and with ATT, I only did no-gi. So I've never been given stripes. I feel like I'd be more than a no-stripe blue belt though. How does this work when switching schools? I never received stripes before.. thanks!

-Mike Hauben

Welcome back Mike.

This is a very interesting topic and I hope Black Belt Steve adds his opinion.

Mike why not just start training as a no-stripe blue belt and let your performence speak for itself.

Professor Soca has been in the BJJ game for many years and I'm sure can make an evaluation of where you should be.


Who cares about belts let us train for the love of training and nothing else.

I agree about training for the love of training, however this will be the first time in quite some time using the gi - I've almost entirely done no-gi - so the thought of advancing and seeing ranked progress excites me :)

let Professor Soca know about your experience and ask him which belt to wear to class...

What's going on Mike,

It's great that you're coming back to train, the academy will be sure to welcome you warmly. There have been other students that train no-gi for a few years and then decided to put the gi on. Each student is different in terms of their progress and where they belong in terms of level. You should tell Soca about your prior experience, and go ahead wearing the belt you have, with out any stripes. Soca will examine how you train, and adjust your level accordingly.
From experience, I found that students that go from no-gi to gi, find a hard time adjusting, due to the subtle differences in attacking and defending while training. Don't be discouraged when you're not training up to your level, as it can take some time to adjust to the gi game.