Andris Auseklis Brunovskis

Andris Brunovskis built his jiu-jitsu career through a series of practical choices: extra lessons during high school, a move for full-time training, a month teaching when money ran short, and six months saving before he could rejoin friends in San Diego. That route eventually led to a black belt under André Galvão and an instructional game centered on connected attacks, especially the omoplata and lapel guard. Brunovskis was born on August 8, 1990, to Latvian parents. He began jiu-jitsu at 16 in 2006 with Darren Branch in Cleveland. As he became absorbed in training during high school, Branch gave him additional private lessons. Brunovskis also spent time training with Cassio Werneck in Sacramento. During that period, he won the juvenile blue-belt World Championship in 2008 and met Keenan Cornelius, beginning a longstanding friendship. A meeting with Lloyd Irvin and JT Torres at a tournament in Ohio opened a different kind of opportunity. Brunovskis moved to Maryland to train full time, trading an earlier routine of busboy work and one daily session for shared housing and training alongside athletes including Torres, Fowler, and Jackson. The arrangement gave him the full-time environment he had been seeking, but it did not last. When the group separated, Brunovskis did not have enough money to follow friends to San Diego. A friend helped him arrange a month of teaching in Austin, after which he stayed with family in Sacramento for about six months and saved. The delay cost him appearances at major championships, but he eventually reached San Diego. By the 2014 Pan Championship, his preparation had become structured again. Brunovskis described training twice a day, following a disciplined diet, working with varied partners, and receiving guidance from Galvão, Campos, and Passos. He won the brown-belt Pan title that year, adding it to a purple-belt World title from 2010. Galvão promoted him to black belt in September 2014. At black belt, Brunovskis won the Asian Open in 2015 and 2017 and the Pan Pacific Championship in 2016, along with European bronze medals in 2017 and 2019. Those results mark the competitive side of his career, but his own instructional accounts explain the technical problem he was trying to solve. As a brown belt, Brunovskis found that skilled opponents were making his triangle attacks harder to finish. He responded by exploring the omoplata, a shoulder lock controlled with the legs. In his teaching, the omoplata is more than a finishing hold: it is a position from which he connects armlocks, sweeps, chokes, back takes, and leg attacks. His stated approach is to change attacks as an opponent defends, so that a stopped first attempt can create the opening for a later one. His lapel-guard instruction follows the same preference for linked controls. Training with Cornelius helped shape a system that includes worm-guard variations, canero guard, and what the course calls the Latvian handcuff. Canero guard uses lapel control around an opponent’s ankle to establish control; the Latvian handcuff traps one arm. In both cases, the control is a starting point for further attacks rather than an isolated position. The technique names are memorable, but the underlying idea is consistent: Brunovskis teaches positions as routes into one another. That technical continuity mirrors the less tidy path that brought him to San Diego and a black belt—one built through changing training rooms, work, teaching, and periods when the next move depended on what was practically possible.