(intense music)
Please welcome to the mats, Sophie Sharp.
I'm 14 years old and I'm a professional jiu-jitsu athlete.
Yeah! Yes, baby!
Even though it is a male dominated sport,
that doesn't mean women,
can't thrive.
Sophie has a tight triangle right now,
tight triangle.
Someone coming in as never doing it, never seeing it.
It's a scary sport.
For Sophie, it's been a life changer.
Her dedication and work ethic is second to none.
She's in here to try to achieve a goal
of being the best in the world.
(knocking)
Hey Sophie!
Hi Leigh, welcome to my home. Come on in.
(upbeat music)
Before we start, tell me about this mark on your face.
I got this scratch from a girl from rolling yesterday
at competition class.
You're scratched, you get beat up basically, doing this?
Yeah. I'm probably covered in bruises and everything.
And you're doing okay though?
I'm doing okay. I'm perfect. Yeah.
(upbeat music)
Go ahead.
You just pop their knee forward here.
Everybody has their own meaning for jiu-jitsu.
But, jiu-jitsu is combat, jiu-jitsu is self-defense
jiu-jitsu is protection.
It's not the type of sport where you're like,
"I'm gonna go do jiu-jitsu!"
You have to be a certain type of person
that will allow like the contact
of another person on you.
She trains seven days a week.
And she leaves it all out on the mats
Doesn't it get tiring?
Some days. I'm not going to lie, some days it's like,,
"Ugh, back to training"
But I mean, once you get there, it's worth it. 100%.
Come on Soph!
(intense music)
The matches that she will do,
It's either between five and ten minutes.
Tournament setting, you'll have multiple opponents.
And it either goes where you get points
for certain positions, sweeps,
you get advantages for submission attempts,
or you complete the match by submission
and you make your opponent tap out.
Ten, there we go that's it, good job.
(applauding)
Submission is when someone would tap out
from either a lot of pressure on one of the joints,
pressure against the carotid arteries,
where we're seeking a choke or something like that.
And we force our opponents to submit
by verbally tapping or tapping out
whether it's on ourselves or on our partner,
or just simply on the mat.
So I'm going to keep talking as she's trying to finish here,
keep going, keep going.
You see how tight that gets?
Do you ever get nervous? She might get hurt?
Yeah.
All the time.
I don't go to tournaments.
I just- I'm not a fan of being at the tournaments at all.
And she's fine with just having her coaches
and her father there.
But even myself,
I'm literally sick walking around the tournament venues.
Fingers crossed, we walk out of there
the same way we walked in.
We've left tournaments and gone straight
to the emergency room.
(intense music) (ambulance siren)
Do you ever get scared?
Before matches? Yeah.
I get butterflies in the stomach and everything.
And I still get that til this day.
But do you get worried
you're gonna get severely hurt?
Attacking the Kimura right now,
in the triangle- oh!
(audience cheering)
Great job, Sophie!
No. That never crosses my mind.
Winner out of the red corner,
Sophie Sharp out of studio 84.
(audience cheering)
So every single day, before jiu-jitsu,
I come in my room,
I get my kettlebell and I do my pretty intense workout.
(intense music)
I do a hundred pushups,
a hundred sit-ups,
a hundred squats,
and a couple of workouts with the kettlebell.
So this whole thing takes you an hour every morning?
How do you carve out that time?
Yeah, with school,
I had to wake up at six every morning.
And you did this before school?
Mm hm.
That's dedication right there.
Okay so, after every workout in the morning,
I always come to the kitchen and make breakfast.
My signature meal is probably eggs and toast.
Butter, I usually do four eggs
You need to get that protein and everything.
My diet is very important for a specific tournament
that I'm doing, the weight class is 135 pounds and below.
And right now I'm 105.
So, that's a very, very big weight gap.
So eating protein, carbs, drinking, lots of water
is all key to help me get to that.
I'm not a big eater.
Eating before practice or in the morning,
I always feel sick.
And so, training everyday like I do is just not good,
but I mean, it's part of the sport
and it's something that I have to get used to.
What's one misconception that you want to clear up?
That girls just can't do it.
They can't hold with the boys in this sport
and I hate to break it to you, but it's not true.
[Coach} Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes.
I've gotten boys that will say,
"oh, she's a girl. I can beat her."
And then, I get on the mat and I submit them
in couple minutes.
I've gotten some boys that cry because of it.
Yeah. It's like a, it's a show.
I'm not gonna say it's rare,
but it's not very common to have women training.
Get the regular triangle again,
just drag an arm across
and then switch to armbar.
So stay there, finish your triangle.
I like to be an influencer in the sport.
So I love to try and get more women
and young girls on the mat.
She wants to be in the limelight as a role model
for young girls and women
with a primary focus of changing people's lives,
positively through martial arts.
She's here training every day, every night,
listening around the groups, asking details.
She helps teach the kids class and does an amazing job.
I get messages from the parents telling us how great she is.
I can sit here and talk and go on and on and on.
But, Sophie, come on up.
(crowd cheering and applauding)
If you were to pick a single age group
that jiu-jitsu, sometimes could be difficult for,
I think teenage girls is probably the most difficult
and not only does she rise above that stereotype,
but she does it in my opinion,
one of the toughest rooms, on the east coast.
Crank that Sophie, crank it!
In theory, she should be only competing
against women, her age, weight, and rank,
but that's clearly not happening anymore.
She's into where she's competing against adult women.
(intense music)
These are all my gold medals that I've won
since the age of 10.
My most recent
is this one.
And that was when I went up a weight class
and faced women.
So that was a big change for me.
How old was the adult that you competed against?
I believe one was 24 and one was 31.
And let's remind everybody how old you are.
I'm 14. 14!
How many gold medals do you have?
I would probably say around 30 to 40,
but that's without my silvers and bronze.
I don't like to look at them, my silvers and bronze.
So, they go in a little cabinet in a stool in my closet.
So, only my golds are shown.
Why don't you like to look at them?
I think of as like bad memories.
It's like, yeah, it's a little dark, but I mean,
it shows me like I didn't do good that day.
Which is not a bad thing.
Everyone loses, everyone wins,
but me personally, it just shows like,
you sucked that day.
So when you lose, it is not a good day for you?
No.
(intense music)
Sophie right now, is training
for what is the Olympic trials of jiu-jitsu with the ADCC.
East coast and west coast trial's coming up
this year and next year.
This is her obsession.
She'll take this as far as she can.
I can't imagine, in five years, at 19 years old,
20 years old, where she's gonna be.
What's the end goal?
Be a World Champion.
(intense music)