Kawehi Gillcoat, a 2019 Lahainaluna High School graduate, wears his bronze medal from the World IBJJF Jiu-Jitsu No-Gi Championships in Las Vegas on Dec. 7 with friends Bec McCulloch (left) and John Vierheller. Courtesy photo

Kawehi Gillcoat is on a mission and his future in the combat sport of jiu-jitsu appears extremely bright.

Gillcoat won a bronze medal in the blue belt featherweight (149 pounds) division that included 110 competitors at the World IBJJF Jiu-Jitsu No-Gi Championships in Las Vegas on Dec. 7.

His remarkable story of grit and determination to even make it to worlds — his final four months of workouts were done in garages and backyards in West Maui following the Aug. 8 wildfire — led to him to signing a sponsorship contract with Hyperfly, a jiu-jitsu equipment company, on Jan. 11.

“I was always dreaming about this for a while,” Gillcoat, a 2019 Lahainaluna High School graduate, said on Wednesday via phone from San Diego, where he is currently training. “Ever since I started I always wanted to sign a deal and become a sponsored athlete. It’s just crazy how fast life works and I feel, like, you put in the work and you do the right stuff, it’ll come around.

“I’m just kind of trying to take a look around and enjoy the moment.”

Gillcoat went 5-1 at worlds in his division — he suffered sprained LCL and MCL ligaments in his second match and soldiered on from there.

Still, there was little solace — even with his bronze medal draped around his neck — because he wanted the gold.

“I think that falling short like that, I have a lot of confidence in myself, and the confidence comes from training right,” Gillcoat said. “I was training as hard as I could with the hands that we were dealt, but I always wanted to compete against the best guys, the best guys in the world and I want to continue to do that. So, it’s really motivating for me to fall short, but know that I can do this.”

He rode adrenaline to the bronze medal with his knee injury. His division competition was all completed in one day.

“My knee would buckle from time to time, like, whether it was in the bullpen or whatever, but I just wasn’t really thinking about it,” he said. “I knew the task at hand and what I needed to do. I wasn’t going to let it bother me at all. The adrenaline definitely helped — I definitely did feel it, but I’m not going to say that it slowed me down at all.

“The next day and the day after that, I really did feel it.”

He recently visited the Hyperfly headquarters where he “got some gear, met the team, and now I’m going to be training with the pro team in Las Vegas.”

The Hyperfly company reached out to Gillcoat in early January and he signed his contract about a week later. Jake Mapes, a former competitor at Maui Jiu-Jitsu Academy, recommended Gillcoat to Hyperfly.

“He’s part of the (Hyperfly) team, and he kind of pointed them in my direction,” Gillcoat said. “Their whole thing is ‘you can’t teach heart,’ that’s their motto. They heard my story and they really liked my story of how we were training in the garages and stuff and trying to find a way and all that.”

Gillcoat added, “He knew that if you wanted to compete against the best guys you’re going to have to come to the Mainland. He heard that I wanted to do the same thing, so he’s letting me stay at his house right now.”

The road to worlds was rolling along as he prepped with his workout partners in Lahaina before the fire derailed everything. He went out of his way to credit all those who helped him on the road to worlds from the Valley Isle, including current Lahainaluna wrestling coach Zane Monteleone and his wife Cynthia Monteleone.

He first trained in jiu-jitsu as a youth at the Academy of Diverse Grappling. More recently, after working on a fishing boat in Alaska during COVID-19 restrictions in 2021, he returned home and started training in jiu-jitsu again when his father Mundy Gillcoat was training for the masters worlds.

“Since then, I got really hooked on it,” Gillcoat said. “I just love to grapple. It’s just like wrestling, but then you can choke people out.”

Gillcoat had been working out at Aloha Roll Academy in Lahaina, which burned in the fire.

“Yeah, man, it was tough because the priorities switched from trying to get ready for normal everyday life and then trying to help out the community,” Gillcoat said. “Once everything mellowed out a bit and we got back to training, I was training in a garage. Professor Dmitry Offergeld really helped out, opening up his house, his backyard for us to train.

“Professor Peter Labrador also helped, he opened up his garage for all of us, too. I was training with uncle John Vierheller and a lot of my boys.”

Currently a blue belt, Gillcoat has risen from white belt. His next step will be purple belt, then brown belt, which is one step below black belt, the highest level.

He will be spending his time between Maui, California and Las Vegas, where he will work out at 10th Planet Las Vegas.

Since worlds, he took a month off to rehabilitate his left knee and has since been training in California after signing his new sponsorship contract.

He traveled to worlds with Vierheller, his coach and teammate who is a black belt in the sport.

“He’s my coach, friend and No. 1 training partner,” Gillcoat said of Vierheller.

Gillcoat stands 5-foot-9 and wrestled at 138 pounds in high school, where he was a two-time state runner-up, four-time state medalist and four-time Maui Interscholastic League champion.

He is using the third-place finish at worlds to drive him forward, but he does so with confidence.

“You know, it’s cool, I just feel like I owe it to everybody else, that’s why it hurt so much because I owed to the team around me, the Lahaina community that’s been supporting me since I was a young kid and my training partners who would show up as much as they could to help me get ready,” Gillcoat said. “I just really wanted to … I felt like I owed it to them. It may look like me who is in the spotlight because I’m the one competing, but if it wasn’t for the team around me I wouldn’t be where I am today. I really wanted to win for them.”

* Robert Collias is at rcollias@mauinews.com.