RENO, NV — The Sierra Grappling Open’s spring invitational concluded Saturday with a brown belt absolute final scored 17-14 in a system that, according to two independent rulebook reviews completed Sunday morning, does not exist.
Organizers had spent the prior week scrambling. Three of the event’s primary referees committed to an out-of-state Muay Thai show before signing the SGO contract, leaving the tournament with two confirmed officials, four mats, and 312 registered competitors. By Wednesday, organizer Deanna Wexham had escalated to a regional staffing agency that books fitness instructors, yoga substitutes, and what the agency website refers to as ‘general martial arts personnel’ without any further taxonomy. Wexham approved the booking by phone at 4:47 p.m. on Friday and went home.
Jerrod Kastel, 47, arrived at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center at 8:11 a.m. on Saturday in a full black Kuk Sool Won dobok with a Korean flag patch over the left breast and a green belt cinched around the waist. He politely declined the gray polo and black slacks set out for him in the officials’ room, explaining that he had been a green belt for nineteen years and the dobok ‘was the uniform he was hired in.’ A volunteer offered him a printed scoring guide. Kastel took it, folded it in half, and put it in his back pocket without unfolding it. He was assigned to mat three.
The first match began at 9:14 a.m. Two adult white belts, one in board shorts that read JIU JITSU LIFESTYLE in distressed lettering, the other in compression pants pulled up over a long shirt because nobody had told him no-gi had any rules at all. Eight seconds in, the shorts grappler grabbed a collar tie. Kastel raised his right arm, extended his thumb and pinky simultaneously in a gesture that does not appear in any officiating manual on Earth, and called out ‘two points, good grip.’ Neither competitor stopped. They had been training for nine months combined and assumed this was a thing.
By 10:47 a.m., Kastel had awarded five points for ‘strong body positioning’ to a blue belt who was being heel-hooked at the time. He had also red-carded a competitor for what he described as ‘leaving the engagement zone,’ which is a Kuk Sool Won concept that does not translate cleanly to a circular grappling area with no visible engagement zone. The red-carded competitor, who weighed in at 154 the night before specifically to make the division, walked off the mat, drove to a Whataburger, and ate alone in the parking lot.
At 11:32 a.m., due to a printing error in the bracket distribution and a separate confusion about which mat had finished its semifinals, Kastel was assigned to officiate the brown belt absolute final.
Neither finalist objected. Rafael Dewitt, 31, a brown belt out of Carson City who had spent six months cutting weight and another two months cutting himself off from his wife to train, was already warming up. Trevor Engelberg, 34, of Sparks, was also already warming up, in part because no one had told him about the ref situation and in part because he is the kind of brown belt who does not stop warming up between matches as a matter of personal philosophy. Both shook Kastel’s hand. Both glanced at the dobok. Both decided that whatever this was, it was the tournament’s problem, not theirs.
The match started cleanly. Engelberg shot a single, Dewitt sprawled, they reset to feet. Two minutes in, during a stand-up scramble involving two failed snap-downs and a partial body-lock, Dewitt’s cheek made contact with Engelberg’s forehead. It was not a strike. It was, by the description of three witnesses including Dewitt’s coach, ‘a mistake on both their parts that wouldn’t have hurt a child.’ Engelberg blinked. Dewitt apologized in the middle of the scramble.
Kastel raised his hand. Two fingers extended, palm forward, with a small bow.
‘Two points,’ he announced. ‘Good strike.’
Then he wrote the score on the scorecard he had been filling out all morning, which was not the SGO’s bracket sheet but a Kuk Sool Won striking-format scorecard he had brought from home. It had columns for kicks, strikes, ki-energy projection, and ‘composure.’ He had been awarding composure points to white belts all morning without telling anyone.
Both competitors froze. They stood up, hands at their sides, looking at each other. Engelberg eventually said, ‘Was that for me or him.’ Dewitt said, ‘Bro, I have no idea.’ The match continued for another five minutes in a state that observers later described as ‘two grown men trying to figure out which of them was being penalized while a stranger in a dobok kept yelling categories of points neither of them had ever heard of.’
The final score was announced as 17-14. Dewitt was declared the winner. Engelberg was declared the winner approximately ninety seconds later, after a recount, then Dewitt again after a re-recount conducted by Kastel’s brother-in-law and assigned scorekeeper Derek Mohn (also Kuk Sool Won, also green belt, also not in the SGO’s vendor system) who confirmed only that ‘the numbers are mostly right.’ The medal was eventually placed around Dewitt’s neck because he was the one still standing on the mat when the medal arrived.
Four written protests were filed before 3 p.m. All four were withdrawn within the hour. According to reception desk volunteer Ainsley Whitaker, each complainant returned to her with the same explanation: ‘He awarded me focus points for filing the complaint and now I don’t want to give them back.’ The phrase ‘focus points’ was repeated by every complainant, none of whom could explain what it meant or whether it counted toward anything.
Wexham, reached by phone at 6:14 p.m. as she stood outside the venue with the bracket binders in a milk crate at her feet, declined to address whether any of the day’s results would be retroactively reviewed. She did issue a statement, which she dictated through the open driver’s side window of her own car: ‘Jerrod is out here working really hard. We had a tough week. The matches got finished. The medals went to people. That’s a tournament.’
Kastel, asked Sunday whether he understood that no-gi jiu-jitsu does not award points for striking, said he had ‘made adjustments throughout the day based on what he was seeing.’ Asked whether anyone had explained the IBJJF or ADCC scoring systems to him at any point, he paused, looked at the reporter, and said the words ‘composure points’ twice, very slowly, as if testing whether the reporter would write them down.
The reporter wrote them down.
As of Monday morning, Dewitt’s gold medal hangs in the front lobby of his gym, beneath a sign someone has taped above it that reads, in Sharpie, ‘Brown Belt Absolute — Disputed.’ Below that, in a different handwriting: ‘But Like, Officially Won.’ Below that, in a third handwriting that everyone agrees is Engelberg’s: ‘No He Didn’t.’