High In­ten­si­ty In­ter­val Train­ing Fight In­te­grat­ed Tech­nique Train­ing (HI­IT FITT) Gym de­fend­ed its Team Grap­pling In­vi­ta­tion­al (TGI) ti­tle when it held the sec­ond edi­tion of the event at East­ern Re­gion­al In­door Sports Are­na in Tacarigua on Sun­day.

Up from five teams in last year’s in­au­gur­al edi­tion, this year’s com­pe­ti­tion, which dou­bles as the coun­try’s na­tion­al team grap­pling tour­na­ment, fea­tured eight teams, in­clud­ing six from Trinidad, one from To­ba­go and one from Bar­ba­dos.

Bat­tling for a $4,000 first prize, they were drawn in­to two groups for the round-robin for­mat. Suc­cess­ful sub­mis­sions earned the win­ning ath­letes five points; each ath­lete re­ceived one point for last­ing the five-minute matchups with­out be­ing sub­mit­ted. The five-minute matchups with­out sub­mis­sion gave each ath­lete one point.

Yon No Gi War­riors amassed 22 points and moved on from group on along­side Pre­mier Mar­tial arts Bar­ba­dos who scored 19 points. In group two, HI­IT FITT raked in 21 points and TT Bu­dokai had 18 to move on to the fi­nal phase.

Amass­ing a to­tal of 36 points in the cham­pi­onship round, HI­IT FITT was well clear of run­ner-up and fel­low lo­cal team Yon No Gi War­riors, who had 30 points. Third place went to TT Bu­dokai (29 points). Pre­mier Mar­tial Arts Bar­ba­dos (19) and To­ba­go BJJ (17) round­ed off the top five.

As the fun­da­men­tal el­e­ment of sev­er­al mar­tial arts such as Jiu-Jit­su, Wrestling and MMA, grap­pling now has its own show­case in the form of this four-ver­sus-four, sub­mis­sion-on­ly tour­na­ment.

TGI pro­mot­er Robert de Gannes said, “Trinidad and To­ba­go is still small in the mar­ket when it comes to Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos in grap­pling. Bar­ba­dos has had for a long time the pre­mier jiu-jit­su and grap­pling tour­na­ment an­nu­al­ly. We in­tend to bring some­thing to the mar­ket that is more ex­cit­ing in a sub­mis­sion-on­ly for­mat.”

With the sec­ond edi­tion of TGI now in the books, de Gannes ex­pects more growth next year and said, “I am re­al­ly ex­cit­ed for what’s com­ing next year. Venezuela, Guyana, St Lu­cia and An­tigua have all reached out to make their com­mit­ments for next year, so we’re ex­pect­ing to have a much more di­verse field with more teams from the wider Caribbean. One thing I will say is that we are not al­low­ing ath­letes from the US and Cana­da. We’re stick­ing es­sen­tial­ly to Caribbean is­lands and our neigh­bours in South Amer­i­ca be­cause we are build­ing this for the Caribbean and show­cas­ing Caribbean tal­ent.”

TGI 2026 Re­sults

Pos*Team*Points

1*HI­IT FITT*36

2*Yon No Gi*30

3*TT Bu­dokai*29

4*Pre­mier Mar­tial Arts*19

5*To­ba­go BJJ*17

6*Fit­ness Un­lim­it­ed*13

7*C-Team*11

8*SWM­MA*10