As students traveled back to campus the weekend after spring break, sophomore Luke Waters sat in the back of the Motor City Casino in Detroit, Michigan, wrapping his hands and preparing for the first fight of his Mixed Martial Arts career.

“I was praying and I was begging for victory,” Waters said. “But there was a kind of peace that surpassed all understanding before I walked up there, which was, ‘God, if you will be more glorified in him winning the fight, then give him the victory, whether that’s tonight or later in my life.’”

Waters began his walk to the cage as “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” by Johnny Cash played over the speakers, blending with the noise of a crowd hidden behind the glare of arena lights.

“It was a very religious experience for me,” he said.

Waters had made the decision to fight just 10 weeks prior. But it was the natural next step, given how he spent his first few semesters at Hillsdale College.

After coming to campus in the fall of 2023, Waters got involved immediately. In addition to founding the nonprofit organization Legio XII Fulminata, he now serves as the vice president of the Reformed Student Fellowship and is a fellow in the Kehoe Family Initiative for Entrepreneurial Excellence.

As the executive director of Legio XII, Waters has pursued his passion for developing young men physically, spiritually, and mentally. At four tiers of involvement, members of the group practice disciplines together — like fixed prayer, cold exposure, and martial arts — aimed at building a brotherhood of strong, Christian men.

“Part of that whole program is we’re seeking discomfort, we’re striving to do the hard thing,” Waters said. “One of the things we talk about quite a bit is putting yourself into the challenges where on the average day you can’t compete, you can’t finish it, and forcing yourself by saying, ‘I will sign up for that,’ to train like it — to succeed very large or fail.”

The MMA match in Detroit was one such chance for Waters to challenge himself, but he said it was also an opportunity to build his resume as a leader in the “masculinity sphere” — what he called one of the “issues of our time.”

“Guys want to listen to guys who have been through really hard things,” Waters said. “This is where you get the David Gogginses, the podcast bros who are all former military or mixed martial arts. Part of it is, ‘Hey, look I’ve done some really hard stuff,’ and building that up so you can have a place to speak to the guys, and you’re respected.”

In his first semester as a student, Waters began taking college-offered courses in Jiu-Jitsu. That’s where he met former professional MMA fighter Larkyn Dasch who helps teach the class.

Dasch started her training when she was 17 years old and fought in her first amateur fight at 18 before going pro. She fought under the Bellator promotion — one of the organizations that formerly sponsored and managed professional MMA fights — even landing a spot in the ring at Madison Square Garden before the COVID-19 lockdowns.

In January, Waters reached out to Dasch, expressing his interest in taking on an amateur fight of his own. He said that, after falling in love with combat sports and martial arts, he wanted to test his will and his abilities.

“Once you’re on the mat and you’re fighting, there is a true measure of ‘how hard did you train?’ and the truth will be revealed,” Waters said. “There’s something I love about that where the really quiet guy who you have no idea what he’s been through can step in and just dominate, and you see that internally there’s a lot of strength there.”

Seeing his potential as an athlete, Dasch agreed to help.

“He was strong on the ground, he could really maneuver people and he did a good job rolling with people in Jiu-Jitsu, so I felt like he had enough skill that he could, even with this shorter notice, do well in a fight, and at least have a fighting chance to win,” Dasch said.

With such little time to train, Dasch decided to focus on developing Waters’ strengths.

“You really can’t, in that amount of time, teach somebody a bunch of new stuff, so you really have to dig into ‘what are you already doing well, let’s do that better,’” Dasch said.

In addition to obtaining an amateur license, Waters adopted a strict seven-days-a-week training plan. Fighting in a catchweight division, he had to cut 10 pounds to meet the weight requirement.

“I definitely cut down — no carbs, no sugar, I was doing keto, tons and tons of cardio, two hours of training a day, which sucks,” Waters said. “Cutting weight is just wearing a bunch of hoodies and doing treadmill stuff for hours.”

He even tried wearing a trash bag under his sweatshirt once before the fight to shed some water weight and get below the 175-pound mark that would make him eligible.

After a couple months of intense training, the day of the fight finally arrived. Originally slated to fight at 8 p.m., the time kept moving up as other fighters missed weight or were disqualified for other reasons.

“All these fights are dropping and it’s like, ‘OK, now you’re actually the first fight of the night,’ and then they moved that even earlier to 6:45 p.m,” Waters said.

Unable to sit still once inside the ring, Waters began jumping up and down as the announcer introduced him to the crowd.

“I have so much more immense respect for the guys who do it for a living,” Waters said.  “It’s like you get stuck with two EpiPens and you’re just adrenaline dumping.”

When the referee gave the signal, Waters came out swinging and hit his opponent, Brody Kelly, in the eye.

“I thought in my head, ‘Sorry man, I didn’t mean to hit you that hard,’ which is what you do in training, you don’t want to hit a guy too hard in training,” Waters said. “But I quickly realized, ‘No, this is my job.’”

Kelly responded with an attack of his own, grabbing onto Water’s torso, planting his feet, and throwing him onto the ground.

“I landed on my head, and then everything after that is a blur,” Waters said. “The whole arena was just spinning, my training went out the window, and really fast I got absolutely gassed.”

After moving around the ring for a couple minutes and trading blows, Kelly put Waters in a choke hold that forced him to tap out with less than a second left in the first round.

“There’s a lot of lessons in that even of ‘how often do you tap out in life 0.8 seconds before the round is over?’” Waters said. “So that really sucked, but it was overall an incredible experience, a great team, a phenomenal stage. There were a bunch of other pro fights that were awesome to watch, so I was glad to be a part of it.”

According to Dasch, MMA is an individual sport in the highest sense. Once you’re in the ring the only person you can rely on is yourself. This self-dependency requires a lot of mental toughness and you learn more about yourself than you can in almost any other situation, she said.

“There are very few other things where you get in the ring and someone is actually trying to hurt you if you cannot keep your mental state in the right spot,” she said.

Although Waters didn’t win, Dasch said the effort he put into his training showed he took the fight more seriously than most amateurs.

“He did everything we asked him to do, took all the steps we needed him to take, and he did a great job,” Dasch said.

In addition to his coaches, Waters had family and friends come support him, including Hillsdale Graduate School of Classical Education student Samuel Sadler.

“I’ve known him for a while,” Sadler said. “I went to college with his brother, so when I came up here he was one of the guys I knew coming in.

Sadler, who also does Jiu-Jitsu at Hillsdale, said he fought with Waters at some of the open mats on Fridays leading up to the fight.

“Usually, he’ll beat me with some move that I don’t know yet, and then he’ll teach it to me and help me out with that,” Sadler said.

Waters said he learned a lot about the importance of striving for excellence through the experience.

“Fail big, fail early, fail publicly even, because it humbles you,” Waters said. “But there’s also a godly confidence that comes out of it, which is like, ‘Hey, I put myself in a situation that was insane, and I got to come out of it and learn a ton from it.’”

Culture can’t change until men are confident in themselves, their abilities, and their relationship with Christ, Waters said. Those things have to be “antifragile.”

“I was on a stage where I wanted to just glorify God in the way that I fought,” Waters said. “The mission isn’t done.”