The app is called PartnerCheck, it costs nothing to download, and in eight weeks it has accumulated 340,000 reviews across 2,200 registered gyms in North America. The average rating for a category labeled “White Belt Who Goes Hard” is 0.9 stars. The median is 0.8. The mode, technically, is zero, which is not possible under the one-to-five scale. The development team has acknowledged this as a rounding anomaly and declined to investigate further.
“We identified a gap,” said Tyler Stanhope, 31, the app’s founder and a product manager who attended three trial BJJ classes in Austin, Texas before being submitted seventeen times during a single warm-up round by a man wearing a wrestling shirt that said BRAWL BOY. “Everyone knows who the problem training partners are. Nobody has a system for it. We’re just bringing accountability to a space that has historically resisted it.”
Stanhope built the first version of PartnerCheck in a weekend. He has not returned to the gym since. His own user rating is 2.2 stars. The top-rated review on his profile reads: “went limp and made extended eye contact with the ceiling for the last four minutes.” Second most helpful: “fell asleep during a paper cutter choke.” Third: “asked if this counted as cardio.”
The review system
PartnerCheck lets users rate training partners across seven metrics: Technical Safety, Pressure Control, Hygiene, Spaz Index, Ego Score, Responsiveness to Tap, and an open text field called Notes for Humanity.
The Spaz Index, measured 1 (Controlled) to 5 (Catastrophic), is the app’s most used metric. National average: 2.8. The White Belt Who Goes Hard subcategory average: 4.6. The highest score in the app’s history, a 4.97, was submitted by four different users describing the same person at the same gym in Baton Rouge. The gym asked not to be identified. The person in question downloaded PartnerCheck last month. He has submitted 22 reviews, all five stars, all from accounts he says he did not create. Three of the accounts have names that are variations of his actual name. The fourth is named TECHNICALROLLING2024.
The Notes for Humanity field was added in week three after users started filing essays in the Technical Safety box. The longest Technical Safety entry in the database is 1,847 words. It describes, in strict chronological order, a single guard pass attempted over eleven minutes, what the author calls “a war of attrition I did not consent to.” He gave 2 out of 5. Under Responsiveness to Tap he wrote: “N/A. I tapped myself.”
Reviews
Three reviews, selected from the top-voted section:
Brandon K., white belt, Charlotte — 1.2 stars. “Arrived fresh. Left immediately for water. Used water break to ask professor about a YouTube technique unrelated to today’s lesson. Returned from water break. Left again for shoes. Has not found shoes in four classes. When present, his shin is somehow always the first thing I see.”
Donna Whittaker, purple belt, Portland — 4.9 stars. “Checked my wrist before applying the wristlock. Verbally confirmed shoulder flexibility before the kimura. Warned me at the start of the round she was having a knee day. Her knee day was technically superior to my healthy days. National treasure.”
Anonymous, brown belt — 3.4 stars. “Technically within the rules. Emotionally, no.”
The data
Phil Massaro, 44, who runs Ironside Grappling Academy in Tempe, Arizona, discovered last Tuesday that his gym’s open mat had accumulated 94 PartnerCheck ratings. The overall average was 3.1 stars. Massaro himself had 4.4 stars, which he described as “surprisingly good” until he read the top comment: “Phil will not roll with you but will spend the entire round crouching three feet away and sighing with increasing personal investment.”
Three gyms have banned phones within 100 feet of the mats because of PartnerCheck. Two of them then posted formal rebuttals to their one-star reviews through the app’s Gym Response portal, a feature PartnerCheck suspended pending abuse review. A gym in Columbus launched a monthly score improvement seminar for a $35 surcharge. Eight members enrolled. All eight are white belts. Four appear to be the same white belt with different email addresses.
Highest-rated practitioners skew toward purple belts with at least one ACL surgery on record. Nobody has explained this. Stanhope called it “the most interesting thing in our data” and said the company plans to build a badge.
Brandon Kreis is still filing appeals
Brandon Kreis, 23, a fitness coordinator in Charlotte, became aware of his PartnerCheck profile in his third week of training. He has 14 reviews averaging 0.4 stars. Notes for Humanity include: “environmental hazard,” “legally separate from his ego but physically attached,” and “arrived at my spine before I arrived at the gym.”
He has disputed six of the fourteen reviews through the app’s appeals portal. The portal requires a 500-word written response and an optional video clip. Kreis filed all six responses. He also submitted four unsolicited supplemental videos.
In one clip, he is executing a berimbolo at a speed a commenter described as “having no business in this zip code.” In a second, he explains why his elbow was not going the wrong direction. In the third, he is wearing a different gi. In the fourth, a different gi again. The fourth clip ends with a title card that reads TECHNICAL in the Impact font.
His rating has dropped from 0.4 to 0.3 stars since starting the appeals process. Reviewers are citing his videos in new reviews. He filed a fifth video Thursday. PartnerCheck’s support team has 61 other open tickets from the same gym.
PartnerCheck raised $2.1 million from a venture firm that also backed an app for rating yoga instructors and an app for rating your therapist that didn’t survive a single news cycle. The firm’s general partner attended a BJJ trial class for due diligence. He got a 3.8 on his Spaz Index. He is appealing.
The White Belt Who Goes Hard sits at 0.9 stars nationally. Asked for comment, the category did not tap.