About | Awakening Fighters
Awakening
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About

Awakening is 100% committed to working tirelessly in supporting the female fight community and strengthening overall social acceptance.

Awakenings core beliefs
We believe that the dawning of the female era has begun. Time and time again, top level female martial artists are proving that their skills are equal to that of their male counterparts. In fact, in many cases women are able to achieve a higher level of technique, flexibility and understanding of the tenets of their given discipline. Traits such as: patience, modesty, etiquette, honesty, purity, self-control, peacefulness, courage etc – traits that come hand in hand with martial arts – all come naturally to women the day they are born.

Everybody at Awakening wants to play a part in the shifting of public opinion towards women in martial arts. Female martial artists are exciting and highly compelling. They have the added advantage of being more evocative and visually interesting within artist mediums, and we want to utilize this – respectfully. Throughout the history of art, the subjects of womanhood, femininity and the female form have attracted countless artists. The struggle of women is as old as history itself, as is their powerful portrayal through art. Countless photographers around the globe are creating very powerful and professional imagery of female martial artists these days. Without many of them knowing it, they are a huge part of raising social consciousness. We utilize this to the best of our ability via our website and social media platforms.

What we do
We strive to constantly create ways in which we can shine spotlights on athletes and the female fight community in general. Largely at the moment, and due to the need for resources, we have limited ourselves to the cataloguing of female fight history. All of our data gathering and collation is aimed at providing female fighters a platform to be inspired by and to grow from. For example, many athletes have told us that they used their Awakening profile to help get them sponsorship. At the start of the Awakening journey we would provide photoshoots, promotional films and other promotional materials to help athletes increase their exposure. This is something we would love to start doing again, however this is now on hold whilst we work towards being able to manage the Awakening database sustainably.

Awakening Female Fighter Database / Global Female Martial Arts Register
The ground breaking and ludicrously ambitious Awakening Female Fighter Database has grown an incredible amount since it's conception in 2012. At the time of writing this our total is just over 10k athlete profiles, and we currently add approximately 200 new profiles per month. We have created the largest searchable online database of female athletes in the world. We felt it was important to start documenting as much information as we can across as many disciplines as possible.

There are many benefits to the female fighter database, some of them include:

  • So many fighters have great careers and are simply forgotten a few years after they retire. The register allows athlete information to be collated and etched into history.
  • Until now, fighters outside of MMA have not kept a record of their fight histories. Doing so allows fans, athletes and promoters to look back at a fighters achievements without having to scour the internet for dribs and drabs of information.
  • Where possible an athlete’s management and coaches are also listed as a means of contact by any prospecting promotions.
  • Links to an athlete’s website and social network profiles helps build fan base and public image.
  • The athlete is given a search engine optimized page for search engines to find them instantly.

Our database currently takes a small team around 140hrs per week to maintain. This amount of time is not nearly enough for what we are working towards. As an estimate, we believe that the database is approximately 20% complete, or 20% of what we would like it to be. It's an ongoing process that will never end, and we love it!

MMA vs other Martial Arts
We all know that the climate in the martial arts world has changed dramatically in the last fifteen years – due to the rise of MMA. The climate is starting to change again with the rise of Women’s MMA. This young sport is extremely exciting and we’re huge fans. There is however a bigger picture in Awakening’s eyes. MMA is just one style of martial arts and we’re here to promote them all and as equally as possible.

The Awakening story
In May 2012, Rew Mitchell and a couple of martial arts lovers assembled to change the world. Well, at the very least, be a part of changing the world! We formed a group of professional creatives with the combined knowledge of photography, design, web development, film making, marketing and forward thinking promotion. This knowledge would be used for good!

We decided to work on ideas that would strengthen the female fight community and help raise social acceptance. Long before we arrived on the scene there were great websites such as Fightergirls.com, WMMAroundup and of course Wombat Sports to name a few. Our goal was not to ruffle any feathers, we felt that such companies all had the same beliefs and could work together. Although in the beginning it didn't quite work out that way, we probably weren't taken too seriously, were deemed too ambitious and were occasionally criticized in social media. We're now a few years on and it has changed, we've proved that Awakening is here to stay to help further the female fight community and all involved. There is still a lot of ground to cover, and many of the female fighter websites still aren’t working together as they should. Awakening is as much to blame as any, but on our part it's largely because we're overwhelmed with messages and are too busy to action many of the plans we have. We are working towards a future where this changes. As an example, female fighter websites should be linking to each other to help raise awareness. Instead many link to non-female fighter websites that have sub-quality information, huge organisations that are making a lot of money and don’t really care about female fighters. This is why we should work together more. We're all fighting to be heard, but unlike the rest of the fight community, the female fight community has an opportunity to stick together are move bigger mountains.

Whilst the Awakening team work around the clock on information collation and presentation, we are working on other projects that we hope to be able to action in the future. As with everything "Awakening", they are ambitious and aimed at helping female fighters get the status they deserve.

How you can help
Awakening needs exposure. There are many ways in which the smallest thing really does help us. Here are three main things that anyone can do to help us gain more momentum:

1) Join us on the Social Media platforms below and interact with our posts so that others may find us
2) Add a link to your Awakening profile to your website, social media "about me" sections
3) Like and rate other peoples Awakening profiles when you see them

These three things are golden to us. Thanks for joining us in our quest!

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