FORT COLLINS, CO — Stonecreek Jiu-Jitsu Academy, a 12-year-old grappling gym that this week introduced a 10-class loyalty punch card redeemable for one free 16-ounce açaí bowl from its in-house ProteinHaus kiosk, is now contending with the formal grievances of five of its original members, who say that allowing first-time visitors to earn the same bowl through a Yelp-review coupon ‘fundamentally cheapens what the açaí represents.’
The grievance, filed Monday as a single-page printed letter taped to the office door of head instructor Adrian Fontes, was signed by all five members of what the document refers to as ‘The Founders Coalition,’ a self-organized body comprising the academy’s longest-tenured students, none of whom hold any formal authority and four of whom were initially admitted to Stonecreek before the gym had a sign, a website, or a second mat.
‘We’re not saying she shouldn’t have gotten açaí,’ said Greg Hodgkiss, 47, brown belt, eleven years training, founding Coalition member, and an estimator at a Loveland-area roofing company. ‘We’re saying she shouldn’t have gotten it on day one. There’s a path. There’s a way. We walked it. She clicked a coupon.’
The visitor in question — Hannah Vellanueva, 24, a software engineer dropping in from a sister academy in Boise — said she had no idea any of this was happening and described the bowl as ‘fine.’
The punch card, which Fontes introduced last Wednesday as part of what he described in a four-paragraph member-wide email as ‘a small thing, just a fun gesture, please don’t make this weird,’ entitles any Stonecreek member to one complimentary açaí bowl after attending ten classes, with no time limit, no minimum belt rank, and no exclusions for visitors using a separate one-time ‘First-Timer’s 5-Star’ coupon program the academy has been running quietly through its Yelp profile since 2023.
Within 36 hours, the Founders Coalition had a shared Google Doc.
By Friday morning, the document had grown to fourteen pages. It contained a chronological grievance log, a hand-typed comparison chart titled ‘Earned Açaí Equivalents,’ and a section labeled ‘Suffering, By Year,’ in which each Coalition member had been asked to itemize, with reasonable accuracy, the cumulative cost of their tenure at Stonecreek. Coalition member Tasha Bellamy, 39, purple belt, nine years and seven months at the gym, and an HR generalist at a Greeley-based logistics firm, described it as ‘more of a feelings inventory than a formal document, but obviously still legally significant.’
The figures, per the document:
- Hodgkiss: 11 years, 4 separated-rib events, 1 staph infection, 1 second-degree burn from a heating pad in 2019.
- Bellamy: 9 years, 8 months, 2 surgical procedures, including a torn meniscus and an unrelated thumb situation she ‘doesn’t want to talk about.’
- Mike Vrbanek, 52, brown belt, ten years training, and a structural engineer: 3 knee surgeries, 1 herniated disc, 1 wedding he missed for a tournament his own coach told him he didn’t have to compete in.
- Doug ‘Big Doug’ Pellman, 44, blue belt, twelve years training, and a high school physics teacher: 0 surgeries, 1 promotion (blue), and what the document refers to only as ‘considerable emotional accrual.’
- Chris Imhof, 41, purple belt, ten years training, and a paralegal: declined to itemize, noting that ‘the math itself is the disrespect.’
Combined, the document concludes, the Coalition has invested an estimated 17,400 hours, 11 cauliflower ears (counted individually, per ear, per member), and approximately $94,000 in dues and gear over Stonecreek’s 12-year history. Vellanueva, the visiting blue belt who set off the dispute by ordering a strawberry-banana açaí bowl on a Tuesday, has invested zero hours, zero ears, and one Yelp review consisting of the words ‘good gym!! professor was nice.’
‘The bowl is the same bowl,’ Bellamy said. ‘That’s the part people aren’t getting. We’re not asking for a bigger bowl. We’re asking for a different bowl. Or the same bowl, but in a different cup. With our names on it. Honestly, just the cup is fine.’
The Coalition’s formal proposal, delivered Sunday in a 22-minute meeting with Fontes that Fontes had been told would last six minutes, requested the addition of a second tier within the loyalty program, to be called ‘The Founders Bowl,’ available exclusively to members with eight or more years of continuous tenure at Stonecreek and to no one else under any circumstances. The Founders Bowl, per the proposal, would be physically identical to the existing açaí bowl, would be sold for the same internal price, and would be served in the same compostable cup, but with one alteration: a small flag, hand-stamped by Fontes personally, reading ‘F.’
Fontes, 50, a third-degree black belt, the academy’s owner, and the person who has personally written every email Stonecreek has ever sent, declined the proposal but said he understood ‘what was underneath it.’ He then offered, against his own clearly stated wishes, to hand-write the names of all five Coalition members on a corkboard above the kiosk under a header reading ‘DAY ONES.’ The corkboard went up Sunday afternoon. By Monday, three other longtime members, neither founders nor part of the Coalition, had asked, politely but in writing, why their names were not also on the corkboard.
A second corkboard, members were told, is being considered.
In a separate development Tuesday, the Founders Coalition convened an emergency virtual meeting via group chat to address the discovery that a second visitor, Wesley Ko, 31, a chiropractor from Cheyenne in town for a continuing-education seminar, had also redeemed the Yelp coupon and ordered an açaí bowl, and had allegedly added ‘extra granola’ — a topping that, per the gym’s own published menu, costs an additional $1.50 and is not part of the redemption.
‘He didn’t even pay for the granola,’ said Pellman, who has been a blue belt for eight years and has, in his own words, ‘been very patient about it.’ ‘I have to ask: at what point does this stop?’
Asked Wednesday morning whether he had any plans to revise or scale back the punch card program in response to the Coalition’s grievances, Fontes paused, looked through the office window at the corkboard, looked at the kiosk, looked back at the corkboard, and then said, ‘No.’
When pressed further, he added: ‘Look. I love these guys. I love them. But the bowl is just açaí.’
The Coalition is reportedly drafting a follow-up document.