PRESCOTT FALLS, OH — Brown belt Derek Coogan has not passed a guard since November 2018, and according to everyone at Ridgeline Jiu-Jitsu, that number isn’t going down anytime soon.
The 2018 pass — a knee slice against a first-week white belt who was, by multiple accounts, trying to stand up and leave — remains Coogan’s most recent top-position achievement. He disputes the characterization that it was a guard pass at all.
“He was getting up. I just fell on him,” Coogan said, before adding that it didn’t matter because top position is “a worse version of bottom.”
Coogan, 33, has spent the past eight years building a game that begins, continues, and ends in some variation of leg entanglement. Training partners confirm that every roll — regardless of whether the starting position is standing, from knees, or from an explicitly assigned top position — funnels into 50/50 or single-leg X within the first fifteen seconds.
“He’ll start standing, pull guard immediately, then invert before his butt hits the mat,” said training partner Luis Denton. “I’ve never seen him in someone’s closed guard. I’ve never seen him in someone’s half guard. I’ve genuinely never seen him above someone’s waist.”
Attempts to force Coogan into a top position have been described as “watching water find a drain.” During a recent positional round starting from side control, Coogan held the position for approximately four seconds before inverting underneath his partner’s legs and re-entering ashi garami. His partner had not moved.
“I don’t know how he got there,” said purple belt Nadia Okafor, who was pinned on bottom at the time. “I was on my back. He was on top. Then somehow I was standing and he was on both of my feet.”
Head instructor Carlos Medina has publicly defended Coogan’s approach.
“Guard passing is just another way to get to a leg,” Medina told ThePorra. “Why pass the guard when you can go under it? Derek’s not avoiding top position. He’s transcended it.”
When asked about the last time Coogan worked from mount, Medina thought for eleven seconds, then said, “Define mount.”
Coogan’s competition record supports, or at least fails to contradict, the philosophy. He currently holds a 73% submission rate across fourteen matches at regional no-gi events — all by heel hook, all from either 50/50 or inside sankaku, and all achieved without advancing past his opponent’s knees.
His two losses were both by points, after opponents broke free from leg entanglements and simply stood up. Coogan did not pursue.
“He just lay there,” recalled one opponent, requesting anonymity. “I stood up and looked at the ref. He was still on the ground reaching for my ankle. I was three feet away.”
The revelation that crystallized Coogan’s reputation came last month, when a visiting black belt demonstrated a side-control escape sequence during an open seminar. Coogan raised his hand and asked what side control felt like “from the top.”
He was not joking.
“I assumed it was a joke,” said the visiting black belt. “Then he followed up by asking if the person on top is supposed to face up or face down. I realized this man has not been on top of another human being in probably six years.”
Coogan’s teammates have grown used to it. A informal survey of Ridgeline’s upper belts revealed that none had been guard-passed by Coogan, but eight of twelve had been heel-hooked at least once.
“He asked me to drill torreando passing last Tuesday,” said Denton. “I showed him the basic grip. He stared at it like I’d handed him a tool from the wrong century. Then he sat down and went for a kneebar.”
Coogan says he has no plans to expand his game. His brown belt promotion last year, awarded for what Medina described as “mastery within his domain,” came with an unusual caveat: it was the first brown belt in the academy’s history where the grading criteria did not include a single guard pass, sweep from bottom, or takedown.
“I sweep people,” Coogan clarified. “Into leg locks.”
He is currently registered for three upcoming no-gi tournaments and has begun what he describes as “light research” into the 50/50 heel hook from turtle — a position his teammates confirm does not exist.
“It will,” Coogan said.