Corvallis local Tricia Straight’s first exposure to martial arts was a Tae Kwan Do class she took just before she left for college. Her father wanted her to have some self-defense training in case someone she met didn’t understand the importance of respecting boundaries. Along the way, she learned that Rhonda Rousey and other women were engaging in MMA (Mixed Martial Arts), and she became intrigued and started pursuing it for its own sake.
But…did she ever have occasion to put her training to its original intended purpose?
“Only once. At a club this guy was being forceful. It was over pretty quickly,” she said modestly.
Straight clearly isn’t interested in sharing “war stories.” She doesn’t even seem extremely interested in talking about her career in competitive MMA, which she describes as having “started in southern California with a couple of cage fights.” Later, she competed in Oregon at matches promoters staged in Salem and Medford, then the pandemic shut it all down.
“Things have only recently reopened, and I’ve had one fight in Eugene,” Straight said.
She is glad, though, that the MMA community has remained in touch through the long period during which no one could compete.
“We all still communicate.” She speaks fondly of moments like a time when the woman who was going to be her opponent mentioned during a pre-match interview that she was looking forward to having some doughnuts afterwards. When it was over, Straight went backstage to the woman’s dressing room, bringing the remains of her own bag of doughnuts, which were happily accepted.
Next Round Fitness, the gym which Straight and her partner Steven Scovell run out of a storefront at 2085 NW Buchanan Avenue – part of the same building which houses Sunrise Nutrition, Star Nails & Spa and Matt’s Cavalcade of Comics – is a lot like Straight herself: there are a few fanciful decorative touches, such as the strings of colored LEDs, but for the most part it just has plenty of what it needs. No more and no less. They have bar weights and kettlebells for lifting, hanging bags for boxing, mats for wrestling. The gym teaches technical classes in boxing, muay thai, wrestling, and kickboxing.
“Steven and I train together,” said Straight. “We like to work with plates and mats. We didn’t find a gym which did it for us, and for others like us, so we opened one. We saw an opening for a gym that would train beginners in MMA. Lately, our clients train mostly for boxing and kickboxing.”
Straight thought her biggest client base would be “stay-at-home moms who wanted to learn kickboxing. That turned out not to be so. Instead, our technical skills classes were filled up. We’re still ready to train beginners, though. We’ve trained people who’ve been coming in since we first opened.”
As they say on their website, they offer training in a full array of fitness and combat sports, and they will “find the competition that drives you!”
By John M. Burt
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