Students prepare for class at Roses MMA in Columbus, Ind., Monday, Nov. 20, 2023.
Mike Wolanin | The Republic
Izaya Carmer and Hailey Barrix both walked past the new Roses MMA gym and were intrigued for different reasons.
Carmer, 21, has been training for his first Mixed Martial Arts bout and needed a place to train. Barrix, 23, and her boyfriend Cameron Reed, 24, were more interested in defending themselves
“I had been preparing at home for (a Jan. 27 fight in Terre Haute), but when I saw this gym, I figured I’d contact them,” Carmer said. “So we started as soon as possible. I needed an actual setting to work out in, and not just home gyms, and this is the perfect place for it.”
David Sotirovski opened Roses MMA two months ago. He’s had seven to eight people come in to train, most of which have walked in after seeing a poster on the door to the gym, which is in the Holiday Center at 25th Street and Taylor Road.
“When I heard it was an MMA gym, I wanted to learn for self defense reasons, just because of the crime and everything happening just anywhere nowadays,” Barrix said. “I wanted to be able to protect myself a little bit better, and MMA is probably the best bet because they train you for almost every martial art. So I’ll be pretty prepared if someone tries to come at me, so I can get away or I can at least hurt the guy.”
“I always talked about wanting to do MMA because I’ve been a wrestler, and I’ve always thought about learning how to defend myself because you never know what could happen,” Reed added. “I don’t want to go and compete in fights, but I think this is a good way to just get cardio in, teach yourself how to defend yourself, and it’s a lot of fun, too.”
Sotirovski took karate while growing up in Crown Point and earned a black belt. He joined a boxing club while in college at Purdue. He said Mixed Martial Arts is safer than some people give it credit for.
“I’ve always been interested in martial arts and combat sports in general,” Sotirovski said. “I think sometimes Mixed Martial Arts kind of has a bad reputation of being like cage fighting or barbaric or whatever people call it. There’s a lot of studies out there that say that the more padding that you put on your hands like in boxing with 16-ounce gloves, the higher the chance of brain damage because what causes brain damage is repeated shots to the head.
“So in a Mixed Martial Arts fight, you might get knocked out, but that’s just because there’s less padding on the hands, and you’ll catch a good shot and get knocked out, and you’ll wake up and that’s it,” he added. “But in boxing, you might go 13 rounds and take hundreds and hundreds of punches, and they find that’s actually worse for the brain than just getting knocked out real quick and popping right back up. Of course, (MMA is) a dangerous sport, but people kind of make it out to be a lot worse than it is.”
Sotirovski recently moved from Indianapolis to Nineveh. While looking for places to open a gym, he met Roger Curry, vice president of Premium Property Management Group, which owns the Holiday Center. Curry was willing to give him a one-year lease with the option to extend.
“When I first started looking around for spaces, I found a few spaces in Franklin that were kind of interesting, but it just wasn’t meant to be,” Sotirovski said. “Then I found this place down here, and really wasn’t so much this space, it was finding Roger more than anything else because a lot of the spaces I had been finding wanted like a five-year lease and all these crazy terms. It’s not that I didn’t have faith in this business succeeding, I just didn’t know how interested people would be in Mixed Martial Arts in general. So I really wanted somebody that could give me a one-year lease just to see if there were people around that were interested in it, and luckily, Roger helped me out.”
The objective for Sotirovski is to train champion fighters. He said most MMA-sanctioned fighters start on a contracts that pay $12,000 to show and $12,000 more to win. He said second contracts in a big promotion like the UFC pay $20,000-to-$30,000 to show and $20,000-to-$30,000 more to win.
“So if you win three fights a year, you can make $180,000-to-$200,000 a year before taxes,” Sotirovski said. “Fighting is dangerous, but there’s probably worse ways to make $200,000 a year than three fights.”
The smallest champion contract in UFC is $500,000 to show and $500,000 more to win.
“I just think that Mixed Martial Arts has a path to a real career,” Sotirovski said. “I remember when I was younger training karate, I always kind of felt like, ‘So what am I going to do with this? Even if I end up on the national team or the Olympic team or something like that, I’m still going to have to get some 9-to-5 job somewhere because there really isn’t that much money in that sort of thing, whereas if you train Mixed Martial Arts from a young age, and you develop yourself as a good fighter, there’s real money to be made there.”
The training sessions at Roses MMA currently are from 6 to 8 p.m. Mondays, Wednesdays and Friday. Sotirovski is hoping to get enough participants to train each weekday, possibly with up to three sessions a night.
“What I would really like, kind of like my dream for this, the end goal is, I would like to have people in here that train five days a week that are really serious about Mixed Martial Arts and are trying to become a professional fighter and just have the school be funded by the winnings of the professional athletes,” Sotirovski said. “If I can just run this gym off of the winnings that people make as professional fighters or a portion of that, then I can even get to a point where I don’t have to charge people for training. If you come in here and you train really hard, you don’t have to pay for training because eventually, you’re going to become a professional fighter, and then your winnings will come from this gym.
“Of course, not everybody in here is going to be UFC fighters, but I think there’s people in this gym that are going to have purpose in raising those champions, even if they’re not themselves professional fighters,” he added. “They say it takes a village to raise a kid. It takes a whole gym to put a champion up.”
