Renowned trainer Shawn Tompkins is back in London for the month of April as MMA has hit Ontario.
ORILLIA, Ont. -- Shawn Tompkins has come home.
The renowned mixed martial arts trainer from Tillsonburg, Ont., has returned to the gym he established many years ago in London, Ont. No, it’s not a permanent move – he will only be heading up the original Team Tompkins training facility for the month of April.
But it has been a while since he’s been back full-time at the gym, where he helped turn local fighters Sam Stout, Mark Hominick and Chris Horodecki into bona fide stars in the sport.
In 2007, Tompkins was hired as a trainer at Xtreme Couture in Las Vegas, an opportunity he couldn’t pass up. Then in October of 2009, he resigned from that role to become head instructor at Tapout Training Centre in the city which is arguably considered the world capital for combat sports.
But he still considers the gym in London, which is now part-owned by Stout, Hominick and Horodecki and renamed Adrenaline Training Centre, the home for Team Tompkins. The reason he’s back right now is simple: MMA is hitting Ontario in a big way this month, and those three pupils are playing starring roles.
Horodecki is featured in the co-main event of MMA: The Reckoning Saturday night, the first sanctioned event in the province, where he takes on David Castillo at Casino Rama in Orillia, Ont.; a short drive north of Toronto. Stout is in town to start his training camp for his upcoming fight against Yves Edwards in Vancouver on June 11. And on the last Saturday of the month, Hominick will fight for the featherweight title against champion Jose Aldo at UFC 129 in front of 55,000 fans at the Rogers Centre in Toronto.
Follow live results for MMA: The Reckoning starting at 8 p.m. ET here or on (Big Game) James Brydon's Twitter page.
Not only are those three his long-time success stories, they are also Tompkins’ close friends. And he has an extra special connection to one of them -- he married Stout’s sister Emilie.
To have all of them back in London, with a common purpose makes this time very special.
“It’s a dream come true for us,” Tompkins said. “It’s been a storybook ever since Hominick beat (George) Roop and we were going to be coming here.
“I had to move away to Las Vegas for four years to follow the fight game because it was my passion. Now I’m very excited to come back home.”
Tompkins said he’s also bringing a number of his Las Vegas-based fighters to assist him with the camp, including some former UFC fighters such as Kevin Randleman and even potential future ones, such as Javier Torres, who is now competing in the current season of The Ultimate Fighter. And that’s not all.
“I’ve got a bunch of guys that nobody’s even heard of yet that are going to come and basically mimic Aldo and Edwards for me for the next five weeks.”
Typically the London-based guys start their camps in Canada but finish up in Las Vegas, which is what Stout is doing.
But for Hominick’s fight, they’ve switched it up and he will instead finish his camp at home, and that’s not just because his fight is in Toronto. There’s another reason -- Hominick's wife is due with their first child four days after the fight.
“I don’t want him to be in Vegas and be worried about his wife,” Tompkins said. “Being here is a very important thing for him because obviously (family is) a big part of life.”
On Saturday, Horodecki hopes to set a winning tone for the rest of the team. But Tompkins knows it will be a challenge right off the bat.
“Castillo is a guy we’ve been studying for a while,” Tompkins said. “He comes out of Utah, out of a very good camp training with Jeremy Horn. We know that he’s a slugger, we know he comes to fight, he’s a veteran of the game.”
Horodecki, who was a star in the International Fight League where Tompkins was a head coach, also found success in the WEC, formerly the UFC’s sister promotion. But he was released by the UFC following a loss to Donald Cerrone after it was merged into the larger organization.
Tompkins said he was a little disappointed when Horodecki was cut by the UFC, but he believes his time will come.
“He’s just 23 years old, he’s had 19 fights in MMA and almost that many in other styles of fighting,” Tompkins said. “I’d like to see him rest and build himself and grow into his body. I truly believe in the last two years he’s just started to become a man with his body. When you stack him up against guys like Gray Maynard, Frankie Edgar, I think we need a little time.”
Tompkins said that they actually plan for him to keep fighting on shows in Ontario until the end of the year. He said there are a lot of shows in the province on the horizon, including a potential one in his hometown later in the summer (there is another one in London on May 19, but they felt it was too soon after the April fight).
Horodecki has a lot of options on the table to keep him busy in 2011.
“These are Chris’s fans,” Tompkins added. “We’re in Ontario. If we can stick around here, we’re in no rush to get back to the UFC. We want to do London, we want to do Sudbury, we want to do other shows in Toronto. The UFC is going to be there forever and he’s only 23 years old.”
If Horodecki does do other shows in Ontario this year, Tompkins may have to come back home a lot more. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
NOTES: The first three sanctioned events in Ontario are being put on by promotions from outside the province.
MMA: The Reckoning is organized by London, England’s Robert Waterman, who is based in the U.K., and the next event -- MFC 29 on April 8 in Windsor -- is promoted by the Edmonton-based Maximum Fighting Championship (albeit its president Mark Pavelich is a Windsor native). And then of course, there’s the UFC.
Tompkins said he’s okay with that.
“I would have hoped that someone locally maybe would have been the first or at least been in the first group of promoters, but the one thing I am happy to see is these are guys that actually have experience in the game,” Tompkins said. “My fear in the sport of MMA is now people are seeing there’s money to be made and I hope we don’t get the wrong people involved doing the wrong things.
“Mark Pavelich is a guy who has been around for years, he’s done very successful shows. The same thing with Robert (Waterman). We’ve got good promoters here leading the way, and that’s what we need.”
