Meet the Overland Park MMA fighter at the center of last week’s UFC controversy
The preliminaries of last Saturday’s UFC Fight Night featured an unusual result, and Overland Park fighter Trey Ogden was part of the headline.
In a contest with Nikolas Motta, Ogden had already secured the a win in two of the three rounds on the judges’ scorecards, and he had the path to victory almost perfectly lined up.
That is, until the referee mistakenly called the match a no contest after Motta was unable to respond while defending Ogden’s arm-triangle choke move.
While upset over the blunder that cost him a likely win, Ogden has been no stranger to adversity. In fact, adversity is what brought him to mixed martial arts in the first place.
“When I was a kid, I got bullied and picked on a little bit, and so I got into mixed martial arts through that,” Ogden said. “It just gave me a framework for a way of life. It started out as a means to an end for confidence or to feel better, but then it became a whole way of life for me.”
Originally from Liberty, Ogden officially signed with UFC in 2021. In November of that year, Ogden fought in front of UFC president Dana White at a non-UFC fight in Denver and was awarded the UFC contract.
For Ogden, he considered that to be his last chance to be signed by the company. But no stranger to high-stress situations, Ogden had his method for success figured out.
“At the point of my career that it came, it was like a do-or-die moment,” Ogden said. “I just focused on the actual fight itself. I didn’t think about anything that didn’t actually matter in the moment of the fight.
He continued.
“There’s a lot of narratives that go on outside of it,” Ogden said. “Like, if I don’t get signed to the UFC with this fight, my fighting career’s over, or what if I do get signed or all of this stuff. But at the end of the day, in the moment of combat, you have to be present with what’s actually happening.”
That approach appears to be working.
Ogden has recorded a 16-6-0 record in his UFC career to date. Ahead of each of his fights, he views the physical preparation as a major key to finding success in the octagon, but the psychological preparation en route to battling nerves is just an important.
Ogden’s key for the nerves? Acceptance.
“Sometimes people feel the nerves and they feel like something’s wrong,” Ogden said. “They take a physical sensation and build a mental narrative around it like, ‘I must be scared, I must not be meant to do this because I feel this fear. A true fighter wouldn’t feel like this, they’d feel confident’. I learned that these these mental narratives were the truth of the moment — that really you just had to be with the physical sensation of the nerves and understand that this is like your body preparing you.
“When you realize that it’s not gonna go away and it’s completely normal, then you stop resisting it. It’s when people are resisting what they’re feeling that they get in like a mental jam.”
That thoughtful approach shows in several ways.
When not in the octagon, Ogden still finds ways to impact the sport through his gym in Overland Park. A head coach at Marathon MMA, Ogden works with other UFC fighters and up-and-coming amateurs.
As a coach, Ogden finds that watching his fighters flourish has helped him grow.
“Everybody has a little different feel and a little bit of personality to them on fight night. And then in the fight ... you get to watch this process unfold in a way that is very, it’s like I see myself in them in a lot of ways,” Ogden said. “I see a lot of my fighters do things like, “Man, that’s not the way,’ and it’s so easy to see when you’re not the person.
“But then there’s also a lot of times where my younger fighters will do something that really inspires me. I almost look up to a lot of my amateur (fighters) because they’ll do things that are almost heroic in the moment. And it reinvigorates my own warrior spirit to see just how hard how hard they’re willing to fight to win, and how far they’re willing to push themselves and how much adversity they’re willing to overcome.”
Adversity has been an underlying theme to Ogden’s career, and the no-contest ruling from last Saturday is the latest in that series. Ogden has made a plea to obtain the full winnings of the match, though there won’t be a resolution until next week. But while he waits, his mantra has been something that he carries throughout his fights.
“It is tough, but at the end of the day you have to make peace with the results,” Ogden said. “What I focused on is: I did give my max effort in the performance and the preparation of the performance, and I performed really well. Everyone knows that, and I’ve had a tremendous amount of support in that. So I’m trying to stay focused on the art itself and not necessarily the result of the art.
“At the end of the day, I do this for a much bigger reason than what the Internet says: wins, losses, and whatnot.”
One of the bigger reasons? The community that he’s worked to establish at Marathon MMA.
“I want to live the martial arts lifestyle and push the science of martial arts to a new level and have a real influence on it long-term and create a community at my gym,” Ogden said. “(It’s creating) a culture of winning, and winning in life and facing adversity and overcoming it and giving people ... some meaningful framework in their life.”
