There’s been yet another shakeup at Team Alpha Male, the Sacramento, California home of UFC stars like Cody Garbrandt, Andre Fili and Chad Mendes. Justin Buchholz. who has been serving as the team’s MMA coach since the role was held by UFC veterans Martin Kampmann and Duane Ludwig, has apparently been demoted.
“I am no longer the head coach of Team Alpha Male,” said Buchholz on a recent edition of Stud Radio (via MMAFighting).
“I went to Alaska and I came back and a lot of things have changed,” he continued. “It’s been changing actually since we moved to the new gym [four months ago]. A lot of things changed. I had a system that I had put in place last year that I was in charge of and I stuck to and made things happen and we’ve gone to a different system.
“Urijah explained it to me that there are five head coaches. So everyone is like a head coach but I am no longer the head coach, I run the Muay Thai program. I’m the only Muay Thai coach so yeah, you could say I’m the Muay Thai head coach. Instead of doing all the practices and doing a ton of work, I’ll get paid by the hour and I’ll just get paid by class and have one class a week, where I was doing four classes and work.
“It’s a changing of roles but I’m gonna do work from the Muay Thai position and keep doing my thing and try to win and build world world champions, but for the the team in general, I’m not running the MMA practices anymore.”
Justin Buchholz, of course, is the man behind a tremendously successful 2016 for Team Alpha Male. As such, he’s not exactly sure why all this has happened.
“When I was in charge of the program, from the beginning of last year, [we won] 17 f**king belts in one year, from unranked to bantamweight champion, 3-4 new guys in the UFC, belts up the ass, 56 fights cornered by me, 20 of them being UFC fights. . .
“When I took over the program [in December 2015], it was in terrible shape. We had four fights and we went 1-3. It was a pretty disastrous end to the year. We weren’t used to taking these losses so to have that record was kind of disheartening. T.J. had left the team and Duane had left. We had Martin Kampmann as head coach for less than a year. . . That’s when I took over the program. I said hey I’m gonna be coach and I put everyone in a position. . . I put the whole program together and made sure that everyone had different procedures in class. We were all together on the same page.
“I changed up the program, I was in charge there. Urijah was fighting. We had a successful comeback as a team when we were written off by a lot of people. It’s easy to forget when we were in a hardship and what we accomplished as a team and what I accomplished as a head coach in 2016. It hasn’t really been done by anyone else. I really understood where I was at and what I had done as a head coach on Dec. 30th when Cody won the title. . .
“It wasn’t the easiest thing to do – taking all these alpha male guys and put them together on a system and have them actually believe in it. It was amazing at the time, and I’m super blessed to be given the opportunity.”
What do you make of Urijah Faber’s choice to remove Justin Buchholz from his role as Team Alpha Male head coach?
This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 10/30/2017.