“I don’t see it in July at this point. Ronda did three fights last year. I think she deserves time off. That’s what [UFC president] Dana [White] said, too. So we’ve spoke about that. You know Dana judges things very fairly, and he completely understood…. It was the biggest loss of my career. You know you won’t ever want that to happen again. So what that means is, I’ve got to work harder. Every little thing I’ve got to be honest with and make sure that we’re ready to go. Yeah there was a lot of criticism afterwards about adding a boxing coach. MMA is not a boxing game, but Ronda got caught, and we will be taking advice from boxing trainers. I don’t think it’s going to be a situation about adding a boxing coach, it’s about getting more thoughts from boxing trainers. I will be speaking to them and getting in the best advice. And if I feel it’s necessary we will bring them in. But besides boxing, even the wrestling, the judo, the grappling aspect of it – just approaching the fight in general, there will be a bit of things that we could add. We’re not going to sit here and change everything that we’ve done, we’ve done stuff that I think is working, it’s been great. We’re not going to have something so much different for Ronda. Have we been doing everything wrong? No, that’s not the situation. It’s a fight, Ronda got caught with a shot, and it was a little bit of a roller coaster from there.”
-Ronda Rousey’s head trainer Edmond Tarverdyan talks to ESPN.com about why Rousey won’t return in July, and why he thinks it’s not necessary to entirely change things up to prepare for a rematch with Holly Holm.
Penick’s Analysis: A willingness to at least branch out and bring other ideas into the mix is a positive, and probably a necessity if Rousey is to return stronger to capture that title. If they can address some of the mistakes made in the first fight, bring in an outside perspective on how to improve some other things that went wrong, and implement those things for when she does come back, she could regain that title and be more dangerous than before. If they fail to identify and address what went wrong for her in November at UFC 193, she could find herself in the same position she wound up in after that fight in Australia.
[Photo (c) Matt Roberts via USA Today Sports]
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