The team continued to grow, as athletes from around the world flocked to the gym to work with the same coaches and fighters who made American Top Team so successful.īut in 2011 - a decade after American Top Team was founded - a fissure happened within the gym that changed the course of their histories forever.įour long-time members of the team - Gesias "JZ" Cavalcante, Danillo Villefort, Yuri Villefort and Jorge Santiago - split from the team amid what was rumored at the time to be a contract dispute with Lambert, who managed many of the fighters who trained there. The gym produced dozens of fighters who eventually fought in the UFC with several of them going as far as competing for titles at different points in their careers. It didn't take much time for American Top Team to flourish into one of the first ever "super camps" for MMA in the United States, rivaling gyms such as Miletich Fighting Systems, a well-known team out of Bettendorf, Iowa. Before long several young, up-and-coming Brazilians traveled to the United States to begin working with the new gym. Once Lambert, Silveira and Liborio started working together, American Top Team was born. Liborio was a well-known coach and fighter who helped found the legendary Brazilian Top Team, but he was interested in expanding his interests to the United States.
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That all changed in 2001 when Silveira's good friend Ricardo Liborio met with Lambert and the three of them embarked on an idea to build a top-flight fight gym based in South Florida. The two friends started building a team of like-minded grapplers who would go around and compete in different competitions just for fun and the love of the sport. Long before the UFC was selling out arenas or "The Ultimate Fighter" was even on the air, a group of friends decided to embark on a project to build a grappling team in the United States similar to some of the top gyms that were operating at the time in Brazil.ĭan Lambert, who was a successful attorney and businessman in Florida, found a new passion when he discovered MMA and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu while working with an instructor named Conan Silveira.