BLOOMINGTON, IN — Colton Hargrove, a 31-year-old senior IT auditor and six-year purple belt at Riverbend Jiu-Jitsu, spent his entire Sunday drafting a 2,400-word Google Doc titled “A Proposal For Uniform Lower-Belt Heel Hook Restriction At Riverbend Jiu-Jitsu,” which he emailed at 9:47 PM to all 312 members of the gym roster, cc’ing his wife, his chiropractor, and head coach Julio Marchetti.
Hargrove has been caught in 11 heel hooks in the last 14 months. He has never successfully defended one.
“This is not about ego,” Hargrove wrote in the executive summary, a section he added after realizing the memo did not have an executive summary. “This is about building a culture of safety, accountability, and knee preservation that reflects the long-term interests of all Riverbend stakeholders.”
Hargrove signs the memo as “Colton Hargrove, Interim Safety Liaison, Riverbend Jiu-Jitsu,” a title he awarded himself on Friday at approximately 3 PM and began using in his email signature by Saturday morning.
No such position exists at Riverbend.
The document, which Hargrove printed on letter-sized paper and hole-punched personally before placing in a white three-ring binder labeled “POLICY — DRAFT” at the front desk next to a jar of zip-tied mouthguards, contains 14 footnotes, three appendices, and a sentence in the conclusion reading, “I am not anti-heel hook. I am pro-knee.”
Sources at Riverbend report that Hargrove’s last three heel hook taps were all administered by Devon “Dev” Kowalski, a 22-year-old former D-II wrestling transfer six months into his white belt, who learned the technique from a single YouTube tutorial Hargrove now refuses to name out loud, referring to it only as “that video.”
“I don’t think naming it gives it oxygen,” Hargrove reportedly told training partner Rhiannon Odegaard, a brown belt, on Thursday evening.
Odegaard then tapped Hargrove to a heel hook at 7:42 PM that same night. She says she wasn’t trying to get it.
“I was going for the calf slicer,” Odegaard said. “His leg was right there.”
The memo proposes what Hargrove calls a “tiered restriction framework” in which heel hooks would be prohibited for all Riverbend members below the rank of purple belt, pending review by the Riverbend Safety Subcommittee, a four-person advisory body Hargrove has also unilaterally created and, so far, staffed entirely with himself.
Appendix A is a bar graph.
Appendix B is the same bar graph rotated 90 degrees.
Appendix C is a screenshot of an ACL tear diagram Hargrove pulled from WebMD, captioned, “This is what we are trying to avoid.”
Coach Marchetti, reached for comment at the front desk on Monday morning while untangling a pair of children’s rashguards from a lost-and-found bin, said he had not finished reading the document.
“I got to the part about the subcommittee,” Marchetti said. “I stopped there.”
Marchetti confirmed that Riverbend does not currently have, and has never had, a written heel hook policy. He said the gym’s functional policy for 11 years has been “don’t catch on a bad one, and don’t give them on a bad knee,” which he described as “working fine.”
Asked whether he was aware of the existence of an Interim Safety Liaison at his own gym, Marchetti paused for six seconds.
“A what?” he said.
Hargrove’s record against Kowalski is now a standing joke among the Riverbend brown and black belts, who gather each Wednesday after advanced class to eat from the community fridge and compare knee braces.
“Dev has gotten him with a basic inside heel hook every single time they’ve rolled since January,” said Marcos Tellaro, a black belt and longtime Riverbend member. “Colton does the same exact thing every rep. He posts up, panics, tries to boot stomp out, dumps his weight the wrong way, and then Dev rolls into it and he taps before the pressure is even there. One time Colton tapped while Dev was still setting up.”
Tellaro said the memo was forwarded to him eight separate times between Sunday evening and Monday at lunch, including twice by Hargrove.
The memo’s 14 footnotes include a citation of “personal observation,” a citation of a 2008 Inside BJJ podcast episode Hargrove could not locate, and a footnote labeled “see above” that does not appear to refer to anything above it.
Footnote 11 ends with the word “because.”
Multiple sources at Riverbend confirmed that Hargrove re-injured his right knee at Thursday’s 6 PM all-levels class while specifically attempting to catch Kowalski in, according to two witnesses, a heel hook. The attempt failed. Hargrove was tapped to a heel hook four minutes later.
Odegaard, privately, offered a more pointed assessment of the memo’s thesis.
“The only knee Colton has ever protected is the one he hurt trying to catch Dev,” she said. “With a heel hook. He’s the hazard. He’s been the hazard for a year.”
Asked to respond to Odegaard’s remarks, Hargrove declined, citing “ongoing stakeholder review.” He has scheduled a follow-up meeting for Tuesday at 5 PM at a Panera on Route 37. The only attendee on the calendar invite is Colton Hargrove.
The subject line of the meeting reads, “Re: Next Steps.”
As of press time, Hargrove had updated his LinkedIn headline to include the phrase “Interim Safety Liaison” beneath his title at Eli Lilly. A pinned post published Monday at 7:14 AM reads, “Grateful to be leaning into new challenges at the intersection of grappling governance and operational integrity.”
He has been tapped to one additional heel hook since posting.