The French Mixed Martial Arts Federation (FMMAF) held a virtual “Town Hall” conference on Friday, April 17 via Webinar.
Close to 300 members of France’s MMA Community connected to see the presentation by the French Boxing Federation (FF Boxe) which has been designated by France’s Ministry of Sport to build an official MMA structure and manage its development. The participants were also able to ask questions and interact with the presenters.
The FFBoxe team included Lionel Brezephin, the Cadre Technique responsible for MMA, Jean-Baptiste Marsaud, the FF Boxe’s Administrative Director and Johnny Frachey, a French pro MMA athlete.
“We were delighted with the engagement and the constructive exchanges during the webinar,” said Lionel Brezephin. “We had so many questions that we ran out of time to answer them all but remain at the disposition of the community and are looking forward to taking the next steps together.”
IMMAF President Kerrith Brown said: “We were very impressed with the level of professionalism of this presentation and the frequent references to the close co-operation between IMMAF and the FFBoxe. We share the ambition to create outstanding structures and governance for MMA in France.”
If you would like to review the webinar, the full presentation is available at:
https://www.ffboxe.com/mma/connectez-vous-au-mma-francais/
The Webinar showed the progress of the FFBoxe’s work over the last two months, and what will be put in place on the operational level in the coming weeks,” said Lionel Brézéphin. “We have already finalised the MMA Sports Code and the training system. We have pressed the start button on the federal machine.”
The main topics covered by the Webinar were: the timeline, the technical and safety rules, grading, coaching and the organisation of competitions.
At the end of the webinar, interested persons who hold coaching or other qualifications (coaches, officials, organisers, doctors, etc.) were invited to join regional working groups, which will work in several workshops.
These workshops will focus on pedagogy, regulatory issues, etc and once validated by technical experts, will be fed into the frameworks already in place.
The main aim is to validate a methodology of teaching MMA. In addition, these groups will help to identify the most active MMA actors in France and allow them to collaborate in a constructive way.
To participate in the next phase of structuring MMA in France applicants are invited to part in the working groups and workshops, via a form which can be found at the following link: https://bit.ly/fmmaf-candidature
News of MMA in France can be found at: http://www.fmmaf.fr
The email contact for the MMA team at FFBoxe is: [email protected]