TEMPE, AZ — A two-month private Slack thread in which Lodestar Grappling owner Kurt Degraw persuaded three rival gym owners to raise their drop-in fees from $25 to “at least $40” surfaced Tuesday after a former front-desk employee reportedly left the workspace logged in on the academy’s communal MacBook, according to screenshots obtained by a visiting blue belt who had been sitting at the front counter waiting for a gi delivery.
The 47-message thread, titled “professionalizing the Phoenix metro,” includes Degraw, 38, coordinating a sustained pricing conversation with Ivan Kalbac of Sonora Submission, Peter Haltman of Cactus League Jiu-Jitsu, and Dustin Reeb of Phoenix Combat over the course of nine weeks. Across those 47 messages, Degraw — whose own academy currently charges $45 for a single drop-in — repeatedly encouraged the other three owners to adjust their rates to “at least $40,” describing the effort as “professionalizing the industry” and at one point writing that the four of them “should be acting more like a chain of restaurants than a swap meet.”
The messages came to light Tuesday afternoon when Haley Bortolin, a former Lodestar receptionist who was let go in February, left the shared front-desk Slack workspace logged in on the academy’s communal MacBook. A visiting blue belt from an academy in Flagstaff — who was at the front counter for what he described as “maybe forty minutes, waiting on a gi delivery that eventually arrived at a completely different address” — told reporters he “kept refreshing the tab because at first I thought it was some kind of training log, and then I started reading it and could not stop.”
The visitor, whose name is being withheld, took approximately fourteen screenshots before closing the laptop.
According to those screenshots, Degraw opened the thread on February 4 with a message reading, “boys, real talk, we can’t keep undercutting each other on walk-ins, it’s embarrassing for all of us.” Within twelve minutes, Haltman, 41, had replied “agreed.” Kalbac, 44, added “100.” Reeb, 36, whose initial response was “lol why is this in Slack and not a group text,” appears to have joined the conversation fully by the second week.
By week three, Degraw had proposed what he called “a $40 minimum across the board,” citing the importance of “treating ourselves like professionals.” By week five, he had floated the idea of a “$50 floor in premium metros.” By week seven, in a message time-stamped 11:48 p.m. on a Tuesday, he reacted with a thinking-face emoji to a message from Haltman that used the phrase “price signaling,” a gesture Degraw would later describe to a local television reporter as “just being polite.”
The thread also contains a forwarded article from a restaurant-industry trade publication, a link to a 2019 Harvard Business Review piece on “value capture,” and what appears to be a draft internal memo from Degraw titled “Operator Playbook: Walk-In Discipline,” which defines “discipline” as “not pricing like a swap meet.” The memo is seven pages long. Four of those pages are photographs of Lodestar’s lobby.
The fallout began within approximately four hours.
Kalbac posted an Instagram Story at 7:15 p.m. Tuesday featuring a plain black background with the words “never been involved in anything like this” in white Helvetica, which he followed an hour later with a separate Story clarifying that he had been “in the thread only to listen” and had “muted it approximately three weeks in.” His third Story, posted at 9:02 p.m., referred to Degraw as “the guy who added me to that” without further elaboration. By Wednesday morning, Kalbac had unfollowed Degraw on Instagram and also on a paid martial arts networking platform called SeminarPin, which nobody had previously been aware he was on.
Cactus League Jiu-Jitsu issued a 190-word statement to a local sports blog that did not use the words “Degraw,” “Lodestar,” “Slack,” “pricing,” “drop-in,” or “thread,” and which referred to the underlying incident exclusively as “the ongoing conversation.” The statement closed by noting that Cactus League “has always believed in a welcoming mat for every traveler” and listing its current drop-in rate as $25, which is the same rate it had charged for eleven years before the thread was initiated and — as of press time — still charges.
Phoenix Combat, whose owner Reeb is currently on a no-gi training camp in Medellín, has not responded to requests for comment. Its assistant coach Todd Reems told reporters he “didn’t know anything about any Slack” and then asked, unprompted, whether anybody was going to ask Degraw about the golf trip.
Lodestar Grappling lost 17 members in the 72 hours following the leak, according to its public member roster, which Degraw updates manually in a sidebar on his Squarespace site and which visiting blue belts have periodically noticed he forgets to refresh. At least three of the departing members posted their cancellation emails publicly, including one from a purple belt named Rustin Marwek, 33, who wrote that he had “previously assumed the $45 drop-in was a clerical issue, not a philosophy.”
On Thursday, the Arizona Attorney General’s office sent a preliminary inquiry letter to Lodestar Grappling, Sonora Submission, Cactus League Jiu-Jitsu, and Phoenix Combat requesting “any and all records pertaining to collaborative discussions of drop-in pricing” across a rolling 18-month window. A spokesperson for the office described the letter as “routine,” while simultaneously confirming it was “the first of its kind ever sent to a jiu-jitsu academy in the state of Arizona.”
Degraw issued a public statement Friday morning on his personal Instagram, posted over a photo of himself teaching a private lesson. It read, in full: “The Slack thread has been taken out of context. I am not going to address speculation. I love this community.”
The thread, as archived in the screenshots, contains no context other than nine weeks of Kurt Degraw trying to convince three other gym owners to raise their drop-in fees so that his own would no longer stand out. It contains one thinking-face emoji reaction to the phrase “price signaling.” It contains the sentence “we should be acting more like a chain of restaurants than a swap meet.” It contains the forwarded Harvard Business Review article. It contains the memo. It contains the four photographs of the Lodestar lobby.
As of press time, Lodestar Grappling’s drop-in rate remains listed on its website as $45.