Henri Hooft is one of the most sought after coaches in the MMA world and he was a part of the Blackzilians, that’s no longer the case. Hooft did leave the famed MMA team, but not for the reasons you may believe.
“I don’t have my own gym, that’s not the way it happened,” Hooft told MMA Junkie Radio. “I didn’t leave the Blackzillians to start my own team or to have my own gym. I left the Blackzillians and also we didn’t have a gym to train with, so I went to another place where friends of mine opened a gym. It’s called Combat Club MMA, and we went training there. And I’m a part shareholder of the gym, so that’s how it really went over. We didn’t have a gym to train, so we all ended up training together and doing our stuff. I think that if we end up having a team, I think it will form by itself, but right now we just got all the guys on the one group and training. As you guys see, sometimes I end up training people outside of my group, like Luke Rockhold, Dennis Bermudez, Ryan LaFlare. I like to do that, so it’s not really my team.”
While Hooft trains a lot of big name fighters, he doesn’t actually have a team of his own.
“Of course, I have my fighters that I’ve already trained from scratch, Anthony (Johnson), Rashad (Evans), Kamaru (Usman) and Michael Johnson, so many people that I train. We all train in groups and we do our thing, but at this moment I don’t have a team," says Hooft.
Rumors of the Blackzilians demise have been going around for some time now, but owner Glenn Robinson says that team isn’t dead just yet.
