Nate Adamson, Michelle Kyllo and Zach Adamson at Adamson Bros. in Seaside.

“A local legend.”

That is how Zach Adamson of Adamson Bros. Jiu Jitsu describes Michelle Kyllo.

After a decade of dedication, Kyllo became the first woman on the Oregon Coast to earn her black belt in Brazilian jiujitsu.

“Michelle is an inspiration to many women here locally and throughout the Pacific Northwest and this is something our community can be proud of,” Adamson said.

Kyllo attended local schools from elementary to high school, graduating in 2009.

“I have always kind of been a little — I don’t want to say tomboy — but when I was in elementary school, primary school, I was always trying to wrestle, scrap with people,” she said. “We’d go to the beach, and I’m like, ‘Let’s play sumo.’ I’ve always been, I wouldn’t say aggressive, but I always liked to mix it up a little bit.”

Her mom always wanted her to be a ballerina. “She put me in dance classes, and I was terrible. I hated it,” she said. “And so when I was 12, I eventually mustered up the courage to say, ‘I don’t want to do this, I want to fight. I want to do martial arts.’”

She started at a studio in Warrenton with tae kwon do kickboxing, her introduction to the martial arts.

“I loved it,” she said. “I never really considered myself very athletic. When I did softball I mostly picked daisies in the outfield. I swam for the fun of it. Any other sport did not appeal to me. And I wasn’t good at them. Why would you do something you’re not good at? We’d go to competitions and I would just whoop on everyone. Once I got started with martial arts, I was like, ‘Oh, my God! I’m good at this!’”

When the dojo in Warrenton closed, she joined a mixed martial arts gym in Astoria.

That’s where she met Adamson. “I was just doing kickboxing, although they did have jiujitsu and grappling,” she said. “But at the time, it was mostly just big, burly shirtless guys doing it. I was 16 and watching, thinking, ‘I will never grapple, I will never do jujitsu, I’m just going to stand up, punch and kick, and that’s going to be great.’”

Fast forward to college.

She attended Southern Utah University, where she studied sociology and psychology with the goal of becoming a counselor or a therapist. It was also there that she trained in the mixed martial arts program. “I just fell in love with the grappling part, the wrestling aspect — more so than getting punched in the face,” she said.

Kyllo was so good in the ring that she drew the eye of show promoters in Las Vegas and Cedar City, on the border of Utah and Nevada, but ultimately decided against it — to the relief of her parents, who while supporting the jiujitsu aspect, didn’t want to see her get hurt.

After college, her career direction was still unsettled and she moved back to Seaside.

When she saw Nate and Zach Adamson had opened a studio in Seaside, she saw an opportunity to continue on the mat. “I’m like, I gotta try it out,” she said. “And so I came in here, and I was obsessed.”

As she entered tournaments, she found that being from the North Coast can be “like being a big fish in a little pond. She had a wake-up call at the International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation world championship in Long Beach, California, in 2019.

“In Oregon and Washington, I compete very well,” she said. “I usually get gold. And then going to California spending $1,000 and losing in the first round — done. That was my biggest disappointment as a competitor.”

She learned from the experience.

“When you get to compete, you get to really test yourself against others,” she said. “I just kept progressing and progressing on that.”

Kyllo has been competing for more than seven years now.

She works at Bank of the Pacific in Seaside as a customer service representative. Eventually, she may work toward a counseling career, “possibly after I have children.”

She met her husband, Grant, when he took a class from her at Adamson Bros. “He was my student, so I waited till he graduated from my class,” she said. “When he leveled out of the introduction class, we started coaching together, and that’s how we fell in love. He’s still my favorite training partner.”

Grant Kyllo is now a purple belt.

A Minnesota native, his real passion is farming.

The Kyllos own land in Elsie with goats, chickens, pigs — “the whole everything. That’s what we kind of do.”

She continues classes two days a week with the Adamson Bros. and teaches private and group classes.

“People should come in and give it a try,” she said. “Most fights do go to the ground and you can defend yourself. If you’re looking to lose weight, give jiujitsu a try. I lost like 40 pounds. Just come and check it out.”