Alvin Aguilar bares huge plans for URCC

MANILA, Philippines – For the past months, people have been asking whatever happened to local mixed martial arts outfit URCC. There were even talks that the organization have folded and succumbed to other promotions. In fact, since the last URCC event in January 2014, URCC founder Alvin Aguilar had been working on making the firm a bigger international brand.

“I’m preparing for something bigger. We have done the same thing for the past five to six years and we went all over the province and the seeds we planted there, they have grown a lot of trees and branches. We have a lot of fighters from the province that can represent the Philippines as well. Now, what I’m trying to do now is to bring URCC to a global perspective,” said Aguilar.

As MMA grows throughout the world, more Filipino fighters are making their mark in the international scene. Among those who had their simple beginnings in the URCC and now considered as world-class MMA fighters are Eduard Folayang, Honorio Banario, Kevin Belingon, Eric Kelly, Rey Docyogen, Dave Galera and Mark Eddiva just to name a few.

Following the rapid growth and popularity of the sport, Aguilar now plans to step up their game as they plan on expanding not only throughout the Philippines, but also in Asia.

“We will be going in Asia for an Asian tour. We have to make sure that we showcase our Filipino fighters much better. A lot of promotions have been coming in and giving our fighters and that’s good. We are coming up with a promotion that will really showcase Filipino mixed martial arts. So to do that, I had to pull more resources way bigger this time. I just didn’t want to do the same thing every year. I want to grow bigger,” he explained

For 12 years, the URCC had grown a huge fan base and this time around, loyal supporters are excited to see that the organization will start to hold their fights inside a cage.

“The only reason why we went to the cage is that, we are preparing our fighters for international fights and everybody in the international stage fights in the cage and I don’t want our fighters to have to adjust to the cage,” said Aguilar.

 Furthermore, Aguilar revealed that he plans to give their fighters better security for the future.

“Our next goal is to get our fighters a real decent job, just like in the United States. I mean you can have a house and a decent living.”

Provincial MMA fans will have to wait a little further for URCC to come back to their area since 2014 will be a year that Aguilar will focus on building the organization to become a global brand.

“We will be doing that (provincial events) next year. This year what my focus is, to have a bigger Manila event that can be seen from free TV and after that go around Asia. The seeds are already planted,” he added.

Aguilar also announced that more fights will be shown on a monthly basis and phase two will enable them to create an event every week.

“We are going to have URCC fight nights very soon. We are going to be trying to go for monthly fights, and from monthly fights, we are going for weekly fights. I want to keep our fighters involved and have something to look forward to and also for them to have a monthly spending income,” Aguilar further said.

The inaugural cage matches were done at Resorts World Hotel in Pasay to give a glimpse of what future events would look like.

Kicking off the matches were flyweights Nico Vidal of F.I.S.T. Gym going head-to-head with Alex Yabez of Hyper MMA with Vidal coming out on top with a rear naked choke at 2:14 of the 1st round.

The second match also ended up in a first round submission with Jay-R Bermoy of Deftac giving a triangle choke on Solomon Dutra of Tough Guys International at the 2:37 mark.

The main event featured the best fight of the night as MJ Abrillo of Yaw-Yan Kampilan defeated John Vergara of Legion MMA in the second round with the referee stopping the match at 2:53 due to strikes.