Filipino fighters, particularly fighters from Baguio City’s famed Team Lakay, are not exactly known for their world-class grappling skills inside the ONE Championship cage. However, a noticeable trend in recent victories suggests things are changing in the Philippines’ premiere MMA stable.
Since Kevin Belingon’s loss to reigning ONE Bantamweight World Champion Bibiano Fernandes in China this past January, Team Lakay has railed off 13 straight victories, including four wins by submission. That was virtually unthinkable just a year ago.
In recent months, Team Lakay has embarked on an incredible winning streak, showcasing a stunningly-improved ground game to thwart several top opponents. Examples include Edward Kelly’s submission of Australian champion Jordan Lucas, Geje Eustaquio’s battle against Gianni Subba, and Eduard Folayang’s triumph over top contender Adrian Pang.
In fact, Team Lakay is about to challenge for two ONE World Championships. Joshua Pacio is taking on ONE Strawweight World Champion Yoshitaka Naito at ONE: STATE OF WARRIORS in Yangon on 7 October, while team stalwart Eduard Folayang will challenge ONE Lightweight World Champion Shinya Aoki for his belt in Singapore’s ONE: DEFENDING HONOR on 11 November in Singapore.
This incredible run has the entire industry wondering what Team Lakay’s secret is for the turnaround, yet the team’s founder and head coach, Mark Sangiao, says the answer is simple.
“First of all, I’m obviously very happy at what we’ve achieved recently. Secondly, there’s no secret. It’s just a combination of countless hours of hard work and the lessons we learned in previous losses to high-level grapplers,” said Sangiao. “Through experience, we learned so many lessons, and discovered that we were really lacking in a lot of areas in the grappling department.
“There’s nothing special, no top-secret training methods to credit. We just got to work and focused on our ground game. That’s it. Everyone knows we come from a kickboxing and wushu base where there’s not a lot of grappling involved. So naturally, we added a lot of different elements of ground fighting to our daily routine.”
In previous conversations with the fighters, Lakay’s members mentioned self-discovery and learning as one of the aspects of their improvement.
Fighters like former ONE Featherweight World Champion Honorio “The Rock” Banario say they all watch a lot of tape, whether on Youtube or by other means, and then go back and share what they’ve learned with each other.
Housed in the mountains of Baguio, Team Lakay’s methods and facilities might not seem like much compared to other gyms with world-class training facilities and resources, but it gets the job done, says Sangiao.
“For me as a coach, I think the basics are really important – even more important than the advanced stuff. And there’s a difference between pure grappling and MMA grappling. We train MMA grappling, and we have added a lot of different drills to our daily regimen.”
As to what those drills are, Sangiao would not divulge, but he did however mention that the team is becoming obsessed at getting better on the ground, which is a great thing to add to their already world-class striking techniques.
“In the past, we were just simply focused on standing and wrestling. If there was any grappling involved, it really wasn’t enough,” said Sangiao. “So that’s what I think is the biggest change in our training – the technical grappling element. Now we spend days just rolling and rolling, banking on repetition to embed grappling into our style.”
However, they wouldn’t be Team Lakay without their trademark technical striking techniques. Sangiao says the key to the next level lies in the team’s ability to put everything together. Balance, he says, will take Team Lakay from being talented fringe contenders to dominant world champions.
“We balance our training into three parts: wrestling, striking, and grappling. This helps us stay sharp on all aspects of MMA. Because this isn’t just a stand-up battle, it isn’t just a wrestling battle, and it isn’t just a jiujitsu battle,” stressed Sangiao.
“MMA is a combination of everything, and that’s what we have worked hard on improving.”
