Martin Scherer trains under Mattias Sandström at Gracie Barra Umeå, a cross-border lineage that puts him in the Swedish-Norwegian Gracie Barra branch rather than the newer Jessheim Norwegian arm. He serves as one of the BJJ head instructors at Polarsirkelen Kampsport in Mo i Rana, the academy that sits on the Arctic Circle and runs one of the few year-round BJJ programmes in Nordland.
Fourteen years of training behind a brown belt is the kind of accumulated time on the mats that quietly outweighs a single competition season. Scherer is part of the long-running senior instructor cohort that keeps the Polarsirkelen room operational across the cold Nordland winters.
For a country whose BJJ activity thins out dramatically north of Trondheim, his work at Polarsirkelen is one of the practical reasons the sport has a real foothold above the Arctic Circle at all.