When the ground-fighting program at PomPomGalli Jiu-Jitsu opened back in 2002, Brazilian jiu-jitsu was still a curiosity in France. The club, based in Ploufragan in Brittany, was the second in the region to take the plunge. More than twenty years later it still runs BJJ and grappling on 220 sqm of mats, five days a week, and is now a Moka Team affiliate.
At the head of the club is Philippe Ferrandi, a brown belt who has been training since 2003. He teaches, runs the structure and organises competitions. Three roles, one person, and plenty of hours spent far from the mats.
A club that is easy to walk into
The signature of PomPomGalli is how it welcomes people. The atmosphere is described as family-like, built on a simple idea: anyone pushing the door open for the first time should feel they belong from their very first class.
That shows in the schedule, which spreads sessions across five days to cover very different profiles:
- Women’s classes, for those who want to start in a dedicated setting
- Grappling sessions (no gi) alongside the work in the kimono
- Casual classes for people who come for the practice and the good mood
- Training for advanced students and competitors
The club runs both gi and nogi, which lets it welcome a traditional BJJ practitioner and a grappler coming from judo or wrestling under the same roof.
A young crew on the rise
Behind the family atmosphere there is real sporting ambition. Recent seasons have seen a group of young competitors emerge, performing at regional level and now testing themselves nationally.
That is often the sign of a mature club: the generation trained in-house starts bringing back results, and becomes the engine that pulls the next one along on the mats.
It also changes what the club has to keep track of. Competitors mean weight categories to follow, registrations to file, licences to renew before a deadline, and training loads to monitor in the weeks before an event. All of it lands on the same desk as the rest of the paperwork.
Twenty years of club life, and paperwork that adds up
A club that lasts twenty years accumulates files. Membership fees, licences, medical certificates, attendance sheets, promotion histories. As long as it all fits in binders and spreadsheets it works, but every new season costs entire evenings.
That is exactly the problem Philippe wanted to solve by moving to OSS Academy. Not a teaching revolution: time taken back from admin and given to coaching.
How PomPomGalli uses OSS Academy
The app centralises what used to be scattered across several files and several heads:
- Membership fees: who has paid and who needs a reminder, without digging through a spreadsheet
- Licences: federation licences tracked, up to date and easy to check
- Attendance: taken at the start of class, so each student’s consistency builds itself
- Progression: belts, degrees and training volume tracked over time, so promotions rest on real data
- Communication: club news reaches members directly on their phones
The key point is the data. Knowing how many classes a student has done since their last belt, spotting the one who has been missing for three weeks, seeing which time slots actually fill up: a twenty-year-old club already owns all that information, it was simply invisible while it slept in paper attendance sheets.
Thank you, PomPomGalli
A big thank-you to Philippe Ferrandi and the whole PomPomGalli team for their trust. Fees, licences, attendance, progression: everything lives in one place, so the club keeps its time for the mats.
Do you run a BJJ or grappling club? Create your academy on OSS Academy and get your evenings back.
Philippe Ferrandi
Coach and club manager, PomPomGalli Jiu-Jitsu
Brown belt, training since 2003
@philippeferrandi
