If you are looking for top prospects in the world of mixed martial arts, the Pacific Northwest is a great place to start. Camps like Team Quest, Rose City Fight Club, Sikjitsu, and American Martial Arts Center boast champions and challengers at every level of the MMA world. However, it’s not just these big-name camps that bring up top prospects. Sometimes a curious mind finds their way into a Jiu Jitsu class and eventually builds them self into a highly skilled martial artist. At Gracie Barra in Portland, Emily “The Mantis Shrimp” Corso has done just that. A fitness lover, writer, and public speaker, Corso has become a dominant mixed martial artist. With a record of 6-0 as an amateur and 4-0 as a pro, Corso has ten fights and ten finishes. With a resume like that it’s no wonder Corso is on the verge of cracking the flyweight top 10. This week I had a chance to talk with “The Mantis Shrimp” about her rise in MMA and where she thinks she will be heading in the coming year.
Corso’s camp, Gracie Barra, isn’t as widely known as some of the other gyms in Portland. I asked Emily if she ever gets the chance to train outside of her home base, taking advantage of the great gyms Portland has to offer.
“[I do my] Muay Thai and boxing at Burke Camp [in Oregon City]. As I am currently in a place of transition, I’ve been visiting new gyms more often to find the coaches and training partners that I like to work with. I like to think that I’m building my MMA ‘dream team.’”
Recently Corso’s name has come up on a couple of top 20 lists for flyweights. With this year being Corso’s first as a professional, her rise up the ranks has been rather swift. I asked Emily if she was surprised by the quick success.
“I was very surprised by how quickly I’ve been able to climb the [rankings]. Though rankings were never part of why I got into this, it’s very motivating for me to see how close the top is. It’s not that important to me to climb quickly, but making steady progress feels very good.”
With nothing but submission victories to her credit one of the obvious questions that comes up when people scout Corso is just how good is her striking game? In talking about this with Corso I found the confidence she has in her striking is very high; it seems she is just waiting for a chance to apply her craft. She summed up the concern about her striking by saying,
“I really would like to showcase my striking, but none of my recent fights have lasted long enough for it yet. I’m very excited about the new dynamic my training at Burke Camp will bring to my standup game, so I hope to get to show it off when the right opportunity arises.”
Greater opportunity appears to be on the horizon for this talented flyweight. Corso confirmed with me that she is currently in talks with a major MMA promotion and it seems that her debut in the mainstream is just around the corner. Corso isn’t just a fighter, she is also an active public speaker and writer who has one of the better blogs from a fighter that I have read multiple times (check it out here). Corso is unique, just like her nickname. And as she told me, mantis shrimp are “violent but eccentric” and she believes that people might look at her the same way they do a brightly colored mantis shrimp.
“I bet no one looking around the bottom of the ocean would see something that looks like an ultraviolet rainbow lobster and think, ‘I bet that’s the most dangerous creature here.’ But it is.”
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