WESTBOROUGH, MA — Lighthouse Submission Academy, a strip-mall jiu-jitsu gym wedged between a Five Guys and a vape shop on Route 9, closed registration last week on its heavily marketed ‘Foundations Six’ beginner program with 47 paid sign-ups. By the time the program graduated on Saturday, the only student who had completed all 18 classes was Marcus Holm-Whitfield, the gym’s evening-shift assistant coach, who signed up because he ‘wanted to see what it was like as a customer.’
Founder and head instructor Lance Petrocelli, a 38-year-old second-degree brown belt and former regional Edward Jones financial advisor who opened the academy in 2022 after a three-day Yoga-Sleep retreat in Tulum, described the cohort as ‘one of the most memorable groups we’ve ever had the privilege of teaching.’ He delivered the line on Saturday afternoon to a tripod-mounted iPhone, in front of an empty mat, while wearing a black-and-orange branded gi he had not yet finished paying off.
The Foundations Six program, advertised on Facebook, Instagram, three Spotify pre-rolls, two billboards along Route 9, and one flyer wedged into the door of the Five Guys, closed registration on March 9 with 47 sign-ups at $179 each. Petrocelli’s marketing intern Kayla Donegan-Moss described the number in an internal Slack message as ‘genuinely wild for our market.’ By the second class, attendance had dropped to 18. By week three, the average per-session count was four. By week four, a single student.
The single student was Marcus.
Marcus Holm-Whitfield, 29, a software QA contractor who has been an assistant coach at Lighthouse Submission Academy for eleven months, signed up for the cohort on March 4. According to the gym’s CRM, he paid the full $179 in cash, declined the optional ‘Foundations Six’ rashguard add-on, and listed his goals as ‘understanding what we are doing to people, frankly.’
‘I wanted to see what it was like as a customer,’ Holm-Whitfield said by text on Sunday morning. ‘I do not recommend it.’
He attended all 18 sessions. He was the only person to attend session five (a Wednesday 7:15 PM class held during the second half of a Bruins-Rangers playoff game), session nine (a Saturday 9:00 AM class held during a freezing-rain advisory), and sessions eleven through eighteen (every remaining class). For session fourteen, when Petrocelli’s car battery died in the lot, Holm-Whitfield drilled an Americana from side control with himself for forty minutes, then ran the warm-up. He logged it in the academy’s attendance tracker as ‘Foundations 6 / coach absent / led drills / am the coach.’
On Saturday at 11:00 AM, the gym held the program’s graduation ceremony. According to two witnesses, Petrocelli stood at the front of the mat, addressed Holm-Whitfield by his last name, and said, ‘On behalf of the entire Lighthouse family, I want to acknowledge the courage it takes to walk through these doors as a beginner.’ Holm-Whitfield, wearing his coaching white belt with two stripes of blue tape that have been on it for nine months, said, ‘OK.’
He received a printed Foundations Six Certificate of Completion. The certificate was matted in maroon. It was signed by Petrocelli, by Petrocelli’s wife and co-owner Renee Petrocelli-Hauck (who attended the ceremony via FaceTime from a Bonefish Grill in Natick), and by the academy’s Inter-System Liaison, who is also Petrocelli, signing under a different email address.
A photograph of the graduating cohort, posted to the academy’s Instagram at 12:08 PM, shows Holm-Whitfield standing alone on a beige mat, holding the certificate at chest height, smiling with his teeth pressed together in a way one purple belt later described as ‘the international expression for I am being filmed.’ The caption reads, ‘INCREDIBLE ENERGY from this group — so proud of every single one of you. #LighthouseFamily #FoundationsSix #JiuJitsuJourney.’ The post had been liked 412 times by press time, 89% by what appears to be the same nineteen accounts liking every Lighthouse Submission Academy post in rotation.
In the gym’s official promo video for the next cohort (filmed Saturday afternoon, edited Saturday evening, posted Sunday at 6:00 AM), Petrocelli, seated on a folding chair in front of a wall of unlabeled medals, addresses the camera directly.
‘The retention rate on the Foundations program,’ he says, ‘is honestly fantastic. We have built a culture here that brings people back week after week.’ He pauses. ‘Marcus has been with us every single class.’
The video does not specify that Marcus is also the person filming it.
The next Foundations Six cohort opened registration on Monday at 9:00 AM. Within four hours, 31 sign-ups had been processed at $179 a head. The academy’s Facebook ad budget for the campaign ($1,400 over six weeks, targeting men and women age 24 to 45 within an eight-mile radius who have engaged with content about ‘self-improvement,’ ‘discipline,’ and ‘martial arts’) was approved Sunday night by Petrocelli-Hauck from the Bonefish Grill parking lot.
Five new student testimonials, all dated Monday, appear at the top of the gym’s Foundations Six landing page. Each has a first name, a last initial, and a stock-photo headshot. None of them have photographs of themselves on the mat.
The fifth testimonial reads: ‘I never thought I could do something like this. Coach Lance changed my life.’
It is signed ‘Marcus H.’