During open mat at Granite City MMA last month, 20-year-old Sophia Hayes donned her gloves to do some pad work — training to help her improve her skills in striking. Opposite her stood Lucas John, the gym’s owner and head coach, who had slipped his own hands into padded mitts for her to hit and avoid. Shafts of early evening light streamed through the former church’s gabled windows, illuminating the pair: Light-footed Hayes, lean and lithe, advanced to strike, gracefully dodging her mentor’s sweeping hooks. Meanwhile, John, 44, in near-constant retreat, deftly guided his pupil around pair upon pair of jiujitsu students grappling this way and that along the mat.
Then it was Chris Perreault’s turn. Each meeting of his fists with John’s mitts was so thunderous an observer could feel it in their chest. The muscular 33-year-old towered over his coach and, like Hayes, made real-time adjustments based on John’s feedback. The two moved with unbroken focus, as if practicing a dance only they knew — a remarkable feat, given their chaotic surroundings.
Granite City MMA is a mixed martial arts gym in Graniteville that caters to students of all ages and abilities. John and his coaches primarily teach Brazilian jiujitsu and Muay Thai kickboxing, prominent grappling and striking styles, respectively, in the growing world of MMA.
As it is most evenings, the gym was sensory overload for the uninitiated. Along what used to be the gallery of the former St. Sylvester Catholic Church in Graniteville, a timer buzzed every six minutes to indicate the end of a practice round. In the former nave, the ground quaked as students practiced new submission techniques. On what was once the pulpit, music blasted from a speaker.
Amid all the energy on the mat, the space pulsed with special excitement for the two star pupils training in the middle of the former sanctuary, who were about to put the small central Vermont gym on the national map. But first, the gloves would have to come off.
A couple of weeks later, on August 21, Hayes and Perreault competed at Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship Fight Night at Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn. — as bantamweight and light heavyweight, respectively. Both emerged victorious with technical knockouts. Hayes overwhelmed and bloodied Alexandra Ballou before the doctor stopped the fight in the second round, while Perreault needed just 37 seconds to dispatch Joe Powers. John coached both fighters from the ring corner, sporting his signature close-cropped mohawk and a bright-red Granite City MMA T-shirt.
The occasion marked a high point in the state’s martial arts history: It was the first time a Vermont gym sent multiple fighters to the country’s premier promotion for bare-knuckle fighting, a growing combat sport where, unlike MMA or boxing, fighters wear no padding over their knuckles. For John, introducing his fighters and his gym on the national stage might seem like a career breakthrough. Yet the coach stressed that what mattered most was seeing his students realize their full potential in the ring.
“Watching them hit [milestones] … that’s what makes it all worth it,” John said after the fights. “That’s what makes the long hours worth it, what the emotions are down to: watching them live out their dreams.”
John turned to martial arts nearly two decades ago when he found himself at a personal crossroads after a breakup. So he threw himself into learning Muay Thai and Brazilian and Japanese jiujitsu. While he was a voracious student, he never fought competitively in a meaningful way.
In 2017, John’s fiancée became pregnant with their daughter, Gracie, named after the family that developed Brazilian jiujitsu. John had been training in Burlington for years, commuting 45 miles from Barre several times a week, but parenthood made that schedule unsustainable. Eventually, he stopped going to Burlington altogether.
Fighters with whom John had trained continued to reach out for guidance and instruction, though. So that same year, he started an informal training operation in his garage. The number of fighters swelled as friends brought friends who brought friends, and he began seriously considering opening his own gym. Once the idea took hold, he told Seven Days, it came to fruition after just two months.
In 2018, Granite City MMA opened its first official home above the House of Tang restaurant in Montpelier. Interest in classes surged, and the gym outgrew the space on River Street almost as quickly as it had John’s garage.
In early fall 2021, acting on a tip from one of his students, John made an offer to purchase a former Catholic church and its rectory in nearby Graniteville. By that November, he had transformed the rectory into his family home and the church into Granite City MMA’s new sanctuary.
“I never wanted to own my own gym,” John said, explaining that training fighters was more of a calling than a conscious goal. “This was not my master plan; it just happened.”
But to hear his students talk of his intuition and “insane fight IQ,” as Hayes described it, John seems to have been preordained to coach.
His star students, Hayes and Perreault, have followed in his footsteps by teaching at the gym. Hayes has pink streaks in her hair and a prominent butterfly tattoo — its thorax a sword — in the center of her neck. When she’s not training or leading a class, she’s shooting videos for Granite City MMA’s social media.
Hayes started training with John at age 14, inspired by watching Ronda Rousey, the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s first women’s bantamweight champion. As a multisport athlete at Oxbow High School in Bradford, she had a promising future in track and field — javelin, in particular — that prompted college scholarship offers. But she just couldn’t ignore the pull of combat sports.
“She’ll literally cut everything out to be here,” her older brother, Matthew, said. “She loves fighting. She just wants to always fight. And when she fights, she’s like, ‘When’s my next fight? I’m ready to go again.’”
Hayes made her amateur debut in 2023 at 18, winning her first MMA fight against competitor Darian Fagan with an armbar submission, hyperextending Fagan’s elbow until she tapped out. While Hayes found early success in mixed martial arts, she soon realized that she’d rather stay standing in the ring than grapple with opponents — and use smaller gloves, if any.
She looked into small-glove Muay Thai kickboxing, but there were no local options for serious competition. And, she said, she had “always wanted to dabble in bare-knuckle.”
Bare-knuckle fighting — or bare-knuckle boxing — is just as brutal as it sounds. Competitors often leave bouts with broken hands and faces. During the fight in Connecticut last month, Hayes picked up a few nicks, while her opponent, Ballou, bled profusely from several cuts to her cheeks, forehead, mouth and nose. A deep gash on her left eyebrow prompted the doctor to stop the fight.
For Hayes, the appeal of bare-knuckle fighting is the freedom to strike without gloves, which she has never felt comfortable wearing. “I just like the feel of it,” she said.
It was the first time a Vermont gym sent multiple fighters to the country’s premier bare-knuckle fighting promotion.
John doesn’t have a background in bare-knuckle fighting, so he leaned on his own training in Muay Thai, Western boxing and Dutch-style boxing to prepare Hayes. With his help, she signed a multi-fight contract with Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship, which frees her from working a day job and allows her to focus solely on training.
Hayes made her professional BKFC debut at Mohegan Sun in March as the youngest fighter on the card. She held her own through the three-round fight but lost by unanimous judges’ decision. Perreault coached as a cornerman alongside John and was recruited that same evening to fight in the August event.
A former nationally ranked wrestler at Plymouth State University, Perreault said he had been “really religious” about the sport since fourth grade. Then he started watching the Ultimate Fighting Championship, he said, “and I was like, I want to do that.”
At six foot two and 200 pounds, Perreault is an imposing presence in the ring. But, like Hayes, he is soft-spoken and reflective in conversation. He entered the amateur MMA circuit in 2013, when he was a rising college sophomore, and won his debut fight via technical knockout in 10 seconds. Over the following several years, he traveled the country to fight and train in top mixed martial arts gyms before returning home to Vermont. He finally settled at Granite City MMA in 2021, moving to central Vermont from his native St. Johnsbury to be closer to the gym.
Two years later, Perreault won his first professional MMA fight against Daniel Keepers, scoring a submission with a standing rear naked choke — a choke hold applied from behind the opponent. Perreault now has a 4-1 MMA record as a pro, with most of his wins coming by knockout or technical knockout, and all but one in the first round — meaning he hits hard. But he’d never considered a career in bare-knuckle fighting until he was approached by a Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship matchmaker the evening of Hayes’ debut. Given his own successful debut last month, his future in the sport looks bright.
Perreault, who works as a carpenter, trains with his younger brother, Jonny, who is one of his cornermen. Also in his corner, figuratively speaking, is his wife, Julia, whom he met at Plymouth State. A former college athlete herself, Julia said she admires her husband’s commitment to combat sports and trusts his skills in the ring, despite the risks.
“It’s just something that he has always done, and he chooses to do it,” she said. “I just know how hard he works, so I’ve always been really confident when he goes into fights.”
To the surprise of no one, Hayes and Perreault were back in the gym the Monday after their Friday night fights. Neither ever misses a class. Part of the gym’s lore is that Hayes once broke her arm trying out a submission hold and still showed up the next day.
That level of dedication trickles down from the gym’s founder. In addition to running the gym, John is a full-time technician at Darn Tough Vermont in Waterbury. He wakes four days a week at 2:30 a.m. to work an 11.5-hour shift, then opens Granite City an hour after clocking out and stays well into the evening. Six days a week he oversees classes, in addition to leading open mat sessions and teaching private lessons. In turn, his students rarely miss class.
“If I plateau, so will they,” John said. “If I hit that wall, so will they.”
He’s not wrong, though students such as Hayes and Perreault are just as likely to run through that wall if John asks them to.
“Lucas always looks out for his students,” Hayes said of her coach, noting the family atmosphere at Granite City. “He always puts his students first. He’s just really good at what he does.”
That’s something the MMA world outside Vermont is now discovering. Just ask Hayes’ and Perrault’s opponents. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “One-Two Punch | With recent wins at bare-knuckle fighting’s highest level, Sophia Hayes and Chris Perreault put Granite City MMA on the map”
This article appears in September 2 • 2026.
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