MADE FOR THIS
T here’s sweat dripping from Jasmine Jasudavicius’s forehead as she pummels the punching bag she’s straddling on the ground. She delivers a left, then two rights before she shifts position to the side of the bag and continues to punish it with elbows, fists and forearms. Her head is down, and the long brown hair she tied tightly atop her head at the start of this five-minute set is now a loose and mangled bun that has migrated way left, over near her temple. Sweaty strands have escaped the elastic entirely.
This is the last set in a two-hour Wednesday morning workout for Jasudavicius that started with boxing and then moved into lengthy sparring sessions with a variety of training partners, both sides pulling their strikes. She’s working alongside 24 other fighters; the Niagara Top Team gym in St. Catharines, Ont. now smells of all their hard work. And for Jasudavicius, this is the home stretch of the hardest work of all, just three weeks out from her second-ever UFC fight, set for June 18 in Austin, Texas.
As a beep sounds, Jasudavicius gets in one more punch on that bag before jumping up to her feet and sprinting across the padded grey gym floor in her bare feet. Her legs don’t quite have the juice they did four minutes ago, but she toughs out her final minute of this workout. She’ll be back this afternoon for her second session of the day. “Dig deep!” her coach, Chris Prickett, yells as she runs by him on that last sprint. “You were made for this!”
It seems obvious now that the 33-year-old flyweight from St. Catharines is where she always should have been, working her way up the UFC ranks. But the fact is, Jasudavicius came to this sport late, and if you’d asked her family members or friends or Prickett — who’s also her boyfriend — none of them would’ve predicted Jasudavicius would one day make her living trying to beat up people in a cage. As Prickett puts it: “When I met her, I thought she was just a regular girl.”
Jasudavicius had never hit anyone or been hit beyond schoolyard play until she was 26 years old. Now she’s fighting on MMA’s biggest stage. Her rise in the sport has been nothing short of meteoric, and nobody on her team of 20-or-so people has any doubt that she will one day own the 125-pound category. “She literally just eats, sleeps and shits MMA,” Prickett says, laughing. “I’m not exaggerating.”
Jasudavicius has to be more driven than your average pro fighter if she wants to reach her ultimate goal. Her late-in-life start means she has less time to earn her shot at the flyweight title. She’s on the clock, and working like she can hear it ticking. “I’m trying to get hype fights, and hype finishes,” Jasudavicius says, throwing a hearty punch at the air in front of her folding chair on the edge of the gym floor. “We’re only here for a short time, so let’s get this going. Let’s really go crazy with it.”
W hen her second child got to be toddler age, Rita Lianga didn’t have much time to herself, and not only because she had two little ones running around, with a third on the way. “Jasmine stuck to my side like Velcro,” Lianga recalls. “She was actually quite shy.”
The middle child in the Jasudavicius family did eventually come out of her shell, and in part on account of her affinity for sport. She played and excelled in everything on offer in school — soccer, swimming, baseball, track and field, you name it. She was named athlete of the year in Grade 4, and won the award in Grade 8, too. At that same time, she made a goal for herself: “She wanted to make friends with every single person in the whole school,” Lianga says. Though she’s not sure her daughter made good on that lofty ambition, Lianga does recall Jasudavicius never had an enemy: “She got along with everyone,” she says. “She was always a good kid, and always did the right thing.”
Jasudavicius was again athlete of the year just before she graduated high school, but she never pursued any sport at an elite level, because nothing she played grabbed her full attention. She had her first taste of fighting the way many do, messing around in her neighbourhood with the local kids. Jasudavicius and her younger sister, Gia, were the only girls, and they play-fought with their neighbours, emulating the popular Mortal Kombat video games. “I was always the underdog, going up against the older and bigger boys,” Jasudavicius recalls. “I think that’s where I learned to be scrappy. I had to be, you know?”
As she got older, her career path seemed crystal clear, and it did involve being scrappy, but the end goal was to protect people. She volunteered with a local fire department, following in her dad’s footsteps — John worked for the Toronto Fire Department. She took police foundations in school, then pursued advanced police studies and loved her work placements. She worked at a homeless shelter for high-risk youth, counselling teenaged kids. “We saw her going down these career paths,” Lianga says, before adding, with a laugh: “She even could’ve gone into modelling.”
But then, about four years ago, Jasudavicius dropped all those other ambitions. Her career path took about the hardest turn possible. And she hasn’t looked back.
I t was Canada Day 2016, and Jasudavicius and a friend went to watch fireworks on the shore of Lake Ontario, in the community of Port Dalhousie in their hometown of St. Catharines. What Jasudavicius didn’t realize was her pal had also arranged to meet up for a first date with a guy she’d been chatting with on Tinder.
The date showed up, and he had a friend of his own in tow, who happened to be Chris Prickett. “Jas got roped into this Tinder date, and so did I,” Prickett says, now. But the pair who weren’t on a date immediately connected. He loved that she was easygoing and fun, didn’t take herself seriously, didn’t wear a ton of makeup. “We were inseparable from the beginning,” Prickett says. (The other couple was not.)
Early on in their relationship, Prickett, who coached wrestling at Brock University and had been a wrestler himself since age nine, was headed to PEI for a week-long training camp to coach alongside former UFC fighter, Jason Sago. He invited Jasudavicius along, because he thought it would make for a nice couple’s trip. “I was like, ‘I get to eat lobster all day? Why not!’” Jasudavicius says, grinning. She did eat her fair share of seafood, and she also watched fighters train for the first time.
Prickett did not expect what came next. “Next thing you know, she’s like: ‘Let me spar!’” he says. “She had never shown any interest in fighting before that, had never done any fighting. At 26, I figured there’s no chance in hell she would want to get into it. I was blindsided.”
Sago and Prickett weren’t about to let her jump immediately to sparring, but Sago did indulge Jasudavicius by teaching her some combat sport basics. “He told me, ‘You have a bit of a natural ability. If you start training, you could make a run at this,’” Jasudavicius says. She didn’t think much of it at the time.
When they returned home, Jasudavicius joined a few practices with the wrestling team — a group that included Olympians and world medallists. And from that point there was no doubt in Prickett’s mind that she was a fighter. “That she was so willing to jump in and spar and wrestle showed me that she’s got, for lack of a better word, some balls,” he says, laughing. “If she chose to pursue this, I knew I would be able to help her and guide her and get her the best coaching, and I knew she could be great. She just had to learn the skills. But she was a savage.”
Not long after Jasudavicius got a taste of what it was like to train with elite wrestlers, the team headed off to Cuba for a training camp over the Christmas break. She joined them, just a couple of training sessions in. “I’m thinking it’s an all-inclusive vacation, so oh yeah, let’s go,” she says. She was at the bar enjoying some adult beverages when Prickett told her he was running a training session in a couple of hours and invited her to join. “Give me a couple more drinks and I will,” she joked. A couple hours and beverages later, Jasudavicius decided: “F— it, why not?”
What followed was an absolute thrashing. “My face was smashed into the sand over and over again, because I didn’t know how to wrestle,” she says, laughing at the memory. “I’m trying my hardest to grab on but I’m getting smashed. I’ve got sand burns because they’re grabbing on with the sand underneath, ripping up my skin, my face is covered, there’s sand in my mouth.
“It was so much fun.”
After that trip, Jasudavicius was all in. She cut down on drinking. She cleaned up her diet. She joined two-a-day practices with the wrestling team. Prickett introduced her to top coaches in other fighting disciplines, like boxing and jiu-jitsu. “I fell in love with everything to do with martial arts,” she says. “The more I discovered about it, the more and more I fell in love with it.”
Her initial goal was to fight in an amateur MMA bout. “Maybe I like it, maybe I don’t,” she says, shrugging. “You never know how you’re going to react until you’re in it.”
She was officially in it on November 18, 2017, in Rochester, NY, at an event called the Rage in the Cage 2. Jasudavicius fought a local named Jaqueline O’Grady. “She had a ton of hype behind her, and they were doing local news reports on her since she was the hometown girl, and I was like, ‘Woo, what am I getting myself into?’” Jasudavicius says. But the nerves went away as soon as she stepped into the cage.
Less than a minute into the third round in the first MMA fight of her life, Jasudavicius choked out the hometown girl and earned the win by submission. She was hooked. “It was the best thing in the world,” she says, of that first win. “You put your life into something and to see it be fulfilled, it’s such an amazing experience.”
Prickett has been involved in fighting and MMA for decades, which you can tell by the cauliflower ears and fit physique and the way he makes a mullet look stylish. And though he saw early on that Jasudavicius was a fighter, though he ensured she had the best training and coaching available, he didn’t expect what happened next.
“To go from never throwing a punch to being in the UFC in six years?” he says, brow furrowed. “That’s unheard of. And to start at 26? No, that’s crazy.”
T he inside of the Niagara Top Team training facility is what you would imagine for the home base of a high-calibre UFC fighter: It’s clean, with a boxing ring and lots of windows, decorated with NTT swag and championship belts. But just as Jasudavicius has had a quick rise, this team has come a long way, fast, when it comes to training facilities. Just two months ago, Niagara Top Team was in a basement gym that had a cricket infestation on account of the reptile shop located above. “Every day we had to get there early and start stepping on crickets,” says NTT coach Matt DiMarcantonio, who opened this morning’s session boxing with the fighter he calls “Jasmanian Devil.” “No hot water, the toilet was always plugged, one tiny window.”
When Jasudavicius joined up back in 2016, they didn’t even have a permanent home. A small group of eight to 10 fighters trained outside, and also in another basement, this one under the Blue Star Restaurant in nearby Welland, Ont., which sponsored Anthony Romero, one of the team’s fighters. Blue Star’s owners graciously offered the abandoned judo studio downstairs for the team’s use.
Jasudavicius remembers walking through the kitchen to get to the space they coined Blue Star Gym. “The restaurant fryer was right above the mat space and the oil would leak either through the ceiling or through a pipe and onto the mats in certain spots,” she says. “We were training and we had to watch for the oil — if you stepped in it, it would stink so bad and you’d slip.” The space wasn’t heated, so they wore hats and sweaters as they trained in the wintertime. They put a piece of felt over a wooden wall and punched that. “But we were so happy to train,” Jasudavicius says. “We got so much work done there.”
It was at Blue Star that Jasudavicius first began training regularly with Teshay Gouthro, her “main man” and longest-time training partner. Since the two were closest in size, they were natural partners in a group that didn’t have other women or smaller guys. “Oh, she’s got some attributes,” says Gouthro, who’s five-foot-four and fights in the bantamweight category at 140 pounds. “She’s a killer. And she’s so long for her weight class. She’s physically gifted, she’s a natural athlete. You watched her progression and it was incredibly quick. It’s also because she dug deep right away. I’ve never seen anything like it. Her diet, the way she trains. She’s always thinking about fighting.”
DiMarcantonio, who last fought professionally in 2019, also points to Jasudavicius’s early investment as a key to her quick rise. “Almost right away she was not working jobs, finding a way to survive and training and thinking of MMA 24-7,” he says. That she lived with Prickett helped majorly, too, thanks to his knowledge and access to elite-level coaching and advice. “But the hard work is what it is,” DiMarcantonio says. “She works harder than anyone I know.”
Jasudavicius went 4-0 as an amateur, and by the time she turned professional in 2019, she was no longer working even part-time at the local homeless shelter. She began eating things like a mixture of canned maple beans and coffee yogurt for breakfast. (Gross.) Fighting was her life. When she choked out her first professional opponent just four minutes and 17 seconds into a bout at a casino in Pittsburgh, it gave Jasudavicius the confidence to know that she was on the right path as far as training and preparation.
By the end of 2022, Jasudavicius was 5-1 as a pro, her only loss coming in a split decision to American Elise Reed in 2019. “A lot of people felt she won that fight,” says long-time MMA freelance writer James Lynch, who counts himself among that group. “Some people felt the judging was biased toward Elise, because she’s the American fighter, she’s from New Jersey, which is close enough to Philadelphia, and Jasmine was in only her second fight [on the Cage Fury FC circuit].”
Jasudavicius believes she won that fight, but the result taught her some valuable lessons, including a big one that helps drive her today. “Before I was going in there fighting all balls, no brains,” she says. “Now I’ve learned to see the fight from the judge’s perspective.
“And there’s the feeling that a loss gives you,” she continues. “I think about that all the time. In the hard rounds in training, I’m sitting there on the wall and I’ll say to myself, ‘If I don’t get this takedown, I’ll lose the fight.’ That pushes me harder in practice, because I think of that feeling of that loss. Ugh, you know? Terrible.”
Prickett says Jasudavicius wasn’t over that loss until her next win, three months later, and she didn’t take any time off training between those fights. “That’s something we’re trying to work on is our happiness not being dependent on just winning,” Prickett says. “But when you put your whole life into it and you sacrifice everything for it, it feels like a waste of life, you know?”
Jasudavicius earned her way to her sport’s grandest stage through Dana White’s Contender Series, which sees fighters go toe-to-toe for the chance to earn UFC contracts. Near the end of her first-round fight against American Julia Polastri, with a contract on the line, Jasudavicus was in full control. “I’m laying down shots on her,“ she says, mimicking the punches from her gym-side chair with an accompanying Ah! Ah! Ah! “I thought for sure that fight was going to be finished. I heard the ref say, ‘Julia, defend yourself.’ I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I’m finishing this girl. Done! Let’s go! Boom, boom!’ I’m throwing everything I got into it.” But then the first-round bell rang. Jasudavicius hadn’t gotten the KO, and she’d nearly emptied the tank.
The fight went the full three rounds, and Jasudavicius held on to win by decision. “It was 100-per cent life-changing,” she says. “You don’t get a contract and you’re back on the regional scene. And the difference between that and the UFC is astronomical, for exposure, fights, life. Of course every fight in front of you is your most important, but looking back at my career I would have to say that was my most important fight.” She smiles, then adds: “Until the title fight, of course.”
Jasudavicius is now 1-0 on the UFC stage, having beaten American Kay Hansen via unanimous decision in January of this year. She was the underdog in that fight. “It wasn’t even close,” Lynch says of the fight. “I think that kind of woke people up to what she’s capable of.”
In her next bout, on June 18, Jasudavicius is the favourite against Natalia Silva, a 25-year-old Brazilian who turned pro in 2017 but hasn’t fought since 2019. It’ll be Silva’s UFC debut. And as in most fights in her weight class, the five-foot-seven Jasudavicius has the height and reach advantage. DiMarcantonio has no doubt how the fight is going to go. “Her wrestling is so high-level, it’s crazy. And everything else is catching up behind it,” he says. “She’s nasty, she’s mean. You talk to her and she’s nice, she’s friendly, she’s so playful, but you put her in the cage and she looks across the cage at a girl who’s trying to take her dream away from her and a switch goes off – and she’s vicious.”
Jasudavicius spent time in both Las Vegas and Florida early on in this training camp, going up against a variety of fighters with a variety of skillsets to help ready her for anything in Silva’s arsenal. Now in the sixth week of her eight-week run up, she’s counting down the days to her next chance to show off her skill and hard work in the cage. “You never feel good, you know, it’s perpetual training, training, training,” she says. “You wake up just feeling… oooof. But it’s all worth it.”
And it’s all for a worthy goal: To feel like she couldn’t have been more prepared for her fight. Earlier today, she chose a guy for a sparring set who had at least 40 pounds on her. “I try to always be ready for the worst-case scenario,” she explains. “I try to always start in a deficit and overcome it in training, so if it happens in a fight I can stay calm and say, ‘Okay, we’ve been here before.’”
That’s one of the biggest points of growth Prickett has seen in Jasudavicius in the last year or so. She’s grown patient, and smarter in the cage. “She knows how to channel that inner fighter, so she knows how to go out and be calculated, she knows how to take her time,” he says. “She’s a calculated killer.”
Against Silva, the plan is to be both aggressive and patient — to find that sweet spot — and to exploit her opponent’s weaknesses. “I’ll bring her to where she’s the weakest and then I’ll be able to get the win, because I believe in both my ground work and my hands,” Jasudavicius says. “I’m looking for a finish.”
She also has her sights set on making the maximum $50,000 on offer, which would come with winning and earning bonuses like Fight of the Night honours. Basically, she’s there to win and to entertain. “That’s what makes it fun,” she says. “I don’t really want to win a fight just by playing the rules — I want a real fight.”
Afterwards, she’ll enjoy herself to the max. “Oh baby, degenerate week!” she says, grinning, her term for the time after a win. It’ll involve a lot of vodka, wine, Texas barbecue, brownies and ice cream. “We’re going to overindulge,” she says, and she’ll be celebrating along with her mom and sister — they’ll be at the Moody Center in Austin for the fight — as well as her team, including Prickett, DiMarcantonio and Gouthro.
Jasudavicius needs to rack up a handful of wins before she sees any of the top 15-ranked fighters in her flyweight division. There’s no doubt among anyone in this gym that she’s on her way. “She’s already in the UFC; she has a little [professional] win streak going already,” DiMarcantonio says. “We truly believe she can be world champion. She’s only getting better. She’s still learning every single day. And she has world champion blood in her.”
“She’s going to show them all this fight,” Gouthro adds. “She’s going to put on a performance, with a smile on her face. And it’s going to be a violent finish.”
Prickett is predicting a first-round TKO against Silva, and he’ll be in Jasudavicius’s corner for the fight. It’s the toughest part for him, to put his love for her on the backburner and be just her coach. But it’s something he’s more than willing to do to help Jasudavicius pursue her ambitions in this sport. “She told me that she felt like there was something missing in her life before she found fighting,” Prickett says. “It’s been amazing to share the love of the sport with her.”
Jasudavicius’ parents won’t pretend to understand it, but they’re her biggest fans. “Go big or go home,” says Lianga, who’ll be cheering and hiding her eyes during her daughter’s fight next weekend. “She found fighting, or it found her. But she found her love, and she’s living her best life.”
Adds John, himself a former judoka: “If all things go well, this could be the beginning of something really, really good.”
There’s no doubt in Jasudavicius’ mind that it is. She loves to point out, “I’m not here for a long time, I’m here for a good time.” She believes that if she can stay injury-free and get in four fights a year, she can earn a title shot in as little as two years. “I want to get popular, I want to make a name for myself within the 125-pound division,” she says. “I want to make Canada proud, and I want Canadians to be behind me just like they were with GSP. Let’s do this, you know?”
Nowadays, when Jasudavicius fights, you can expect anything but crickets.