NAPERVILLE, IL — Wade Pullman, 39, a mortgage loan officer and three-stripe white belt of eleven months, has spent $18,400 on his 9-year-old son Cooper’s tournament season. The season began in September. Cooper has asked to try soccer six times.
The figure, which Pullman confirmed in an extended conversation with ThePorra while Cooper ate a sleeve of Goldfish crackers twenty feet away, breaks down as follows: nine tournament entry fees totaling $1,980; hotel rooms in four states adding up to $3,600; a roundtrip flight to Phoenix for the Western Youth Invitational, where Cooper finished third in a bracket of three; thirty-six private lessons with Ironside Jiu-Jitsu competition coach Dylan Mercer at $60 per hour; a sports performance specialist named Trevor who works with Cooper on “explosiveness and mat awareness” for $300 per month; three custom gis with Cooper’s name embroidered on the lapels at $200 each; a GoPro filming rig that attaches to the bleachers plus an editing service that produces tournament highlight reels; two cold plunge sessions at a recovery studio in Downers Grove; and $1,208 in açaí bowls purchased at or near competition venues across the Midwest.
Pullman did not consult Cooper about the açaí. Cooper prefers a strawberry banana smoothie.
“He’s got real potential,” said Pullman, who took his first class in October and received his third stripe last month after correctly identifying a collar choke during a quiz administered by his instructor, Marcus Webb, a purple belt who opened Ironside out of a church gymnasium eighteen months ago. “You can see it in the way he moves. He’s got fluidity. Not every kid has that.”
Cooper, who is four feet two and weighs sixty-one pounds, spent Saturday’s tournament sitting in folding bleachers next to Pullman’s wife, Denise, eating the Goldfish crackers and asking when they could leave. He went 1-1 in his division, winning his first match by points when his opponent slipped getting off the mat and cried for four minutes, and losing his second by rear naked choke at the 1:22 mark. He received a third-place ribbon. He asked, upon being handed the ribbon, whether he could trade it for a Gatorade.
The soccer request has been formally documented. According to Denise, who agreed to speak with ThePorra but asked that we not describe her expression while doing so, Cooper first mentioned soccer in August, one week before his debut at the Tri-County Youth Autumn Scramble. The second request came in October, after his team at Ironside was defeated at the Prairie Lakes Fall Classic by a seven-year-old from a gym in Schaumburg. The third and fourth requests were made on a single car ride home from Indianapolis, twelve minutes apart. The fifth was delivered via handwritten note slipped under the bathroom door on a Sunday morning. The sixth was verbal, at breakfast, and included the word “please.”
Pullman’s response to each request has been materially identical: a discussion about commitment, discipline, and the compound value of starting early. The last time Cooper asked, Pullman produced a laminated printout showing BJJ’s projected growth curve through 2035.
“I appreciate him asking,” Pullman said. “That shows initiative. We’re just at a critical phase right now. You don’t quit during the critical phase.”
When asked what phase follows the critical phase, Pullman said he expected to reassess after the spring circuit.
The spring circuit is currently fourteen events.
Coach Marcus Webb, who has watched Cooper train for eight months and whose own children play baseball, said the situation was “totally normal” for youth competition families, then immediately changed the subject to Ironside’s upcoming belt ceremony. When pressed, Webb confirmed that Cooper was “technically improving” and “shows up” and “seems like a good kid,” qualifications that declined in specificity with each word.
“The dad is very engaged,” Webb said.
Other parents at Saturday’s tournament offered similar assessments from a safe distance. “I saw the kid walk off the mat after his match and go directly to his mom for a snack,” said Terry Okonkwo, whose son Damien also competes in the youth division and plays travel soccer in the spring. “Like, he didn’t even look at his dad. That’s a different situation.”
Pullman has already registered Cooper for the summer circuit, which runs June through August and includes six events, two of which require hotel stays of at least two nights. He has also enrolled Cooper in a three-day Elite Youth Competitor camp being held in Bloomington in July, at a cost of $595. He found the camp through a Facebook group he joined in March called Raising Champions Through Grappling, which has 14,000 members and hosts weekly webinars about mental toughness in athletes under twelve.
Denise Pullman, who works as a dental hygienist and has attended every tournament, confirmed that she has Googled “youth soccer leagues Naperville” twice in the last thirty days. She has not mentioned this to her husband.
Cooper Pullman, speaking briefly with ThePorra while his father photographed the venue for a post he was drafting about investing in your athlete’s environment, said that soccer looked “really fun” and that his friend Jaylen plays it and “they have snacks after every game, not just tournaments.”
He then returned to the bleachers, reclaimed his Goldfish crackers, and watched two twelve-year-olds compete for a bracket position he would not occupy.
On the drive home, he asked, for the seventh time, about soccer.
Pullman told him it was a critical phase.