LAKEWOOD, N.J. — Citing a need for structured guidance and a surplus of available personnel, Lakewood Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu announced this week the launch of its new Foundations Mentorship Initiative, a program that pairs every incoming white belt with an experienced training partner who can show them the ropes.
Each of the twelve newly enrolled white belts has been assigned to Derek Mahoney, 41, a regional sales manager for a bathroom fixtures distributorship, who has held his blue belt since January of 2009.
“The mentorship program is something we’ve been working toward for a long time,” said Professor Marcus Holloway, head instructor and 3rd-degree black belt, in an announcement posted to the gym’s website. “White belts need structure. They need someone who understands what it feels like to be exactly where they are — to see the path ahead clearly and share that vision. Derek has been here since the beginning. He’s institutional knowledge.”
Derek has been at blue belt for sixteen years, four months, and — according to Derek — approximately eleven days. His blue belt was awarded during the first term of the 44th president of the United States, predating the iPad, the widespread adoption of Instagram, and the heel hook revolution that, in his words, “completely changed the game right when my game was finally clicking.”
He has outlasted twenty-three purple belts, four brown belts, and one black belt who quit to open a CrossFit gym. He watched a former training partner earn his black belt and open a competing academy across town. He attended the promotion ceremony of a man he once submitted during a flow roll.
“I’m not bitter,” Derek said during a brief interview conducted between rounds at open mat, while taping his thumb. “I just think people underestimate how technical my game actually is. The professor knows what he has. He’s not going to promote me until it’s right.”
Asked when he thought that might be, Derek said he was “very close.”
He said this in 2018 as well. There is documentation.
The Foundations Mentorship Initiative officially launched Tuesday, with the twelve new white belts — seven adults, four teenagers, and one retired schoolteacher named Carol who is “just here to try something new” — each receiving a laminated card with Derek’s contact information, training schedule, and a note from Professor Holloway encouraging them to treat every session with Derek as “a chance to absorb sixteen years of accumulated wisdom.”
Tyler Gretz, 28, a physical therapist from Brick Township who signed up three weeks ago, said he had not expected his assigned mentor to have been at the same belt for longer than Tyler had been a legal adult.
“He seems like he knows a lot,” Tyler said carefully. “He showed me an armbar from closed guard that he said was going to ‘confuse people.’ I asked him what belt he was, and he gave a long answer that ended with ‘so the stripes don’t really tell the whole story.’”
Derek does have four stripes on his blue belt. He received the fourth stripe in 2016 and has described it as “basically a stepping stone to the conversation about purple.”
The mentorship curriculum, designed by Derek after Professor Holloway gave him “the latitude to do it his way,” includes a mandatory orientation session Derek calls “The Long Game,” a module on stripe politics (“the system is flawed, but you have to understand it to survive it”), and a recurring lecture on why white belts should never compete too early. This lecture is delivered by a man who last competed in 2014, went 2-1, and still mentions it.
Initial feedback from white belts has been mixed.
Sofia Kamara, 31, an accountant who started training last month, said Derek spent their entire first mentorship session explaining a sweep he developed “independently” that he had never seen anyone else do, before noting that the move didn’t have a name yet but that he was “open to suggestions.”
“I’ve been doing jiu-jitsu for five weeks,” Sofia said. “I don’t know what a berimbolo is. I just nodded.”
Tommy Reyes, 17, said Derek pulled him aside after class to share a handwritten document titled “The Unspoken Stripe Criteria,” which Derek had compiled over several years from what he described as “pattern recognition and a few direct conversations with the professor that I found instructive.” The document was eleven pages, single-spaced, and included a hand-drawn chart.
Tommy said he thanked Derek, folded the document, and placed it in his gym bag, where it remains.
Derek is enthusiastic. He arrives early to each mentorship session with a clipboard, refers to the program as “the initiative” in conversation with other gym members, and has proposed expanding the curriculum to include a seminar on gi selection for beginners. He personally owns eleven gis and says he could talk about it “for an hour, easy, maybe ninety minutes.”
Others have said nothing, because Derek is standing right there.
“Look,” Derek said, adjusting his four-stripe blue belt before Thursday evening class, “when I started here in ‘09, nobody helped me. I figured it out completely on my own. These kids are getting something I never had. I’m proud to give it to them.”
He paused.
“I should be a purple belt,” he added. “I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying.”
Professor Holloway, reached for comment after class, confirmed the mentorship program was “going great” and that Derek “brings a real energy to it.”
He then excused himself to conduct a private closed-door meeting with a purple belt who started training six years after Derek.