Brandon Royval sat tearful at a UFC post-fight news conference in 2020. He was happy with the win, sure – but the performance bonus? That was life-changing.
Headlines centered around Royval being able to quit his day job at a juvenile detention center. MMA could be his full-time gig. Little did Royval know, the next step of his dream would also leave a bit of a void.
“I kind of just wanted to get back into that situation and dive in where I can,” Royval recently told MMA Junkie. “It turned into me trying to go back to the juvey and work as a volunteer. Then, things kind of get hard from there (and I found out) the best way to get involved is to get into the prevention side of things. It turned into, ‘How do I go and get there before the kids are actually in trouble and in gangs?'”
Each Wednesday, Royval dedicates his time to mentoring and assisting at-risk and unpriviledged middle and high school kids at the Denver Dream Center, a group founded in 2014 in an effort to “bring wrap-around services, pro-social events, and crisis intervention services to share love and effective support with those who need it most.”
Royval, 31, will show up to the center and play games with the kids, or maybe just talk. But his presence is felt – as are the kids’, to him. The community continues to grow, as has Royval’s admiration for its programs.
“The untapped potential in a lot of people is crazy,” Royval said. “I feel like if you can spark that in anybody, it’ll lead to a better world. … Years of working in the ‘juvey,’ you see some kids who have some great leadership qualities. They’re super intelligent. They’re picking up on things super quickly, but the resources around them aren’t there.
“… If we bridge that gap in the future, it’s going to make the biggest difference in our world. It’s going to lessen how many people enter the corrections system, how many people are being successful on a daily basis, or just in life. If you can tap into that and make those things happen, I feel like you can change the world for the better.”
Saturday at UFC 296 at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Rovyal steps into the biggest fight of his life. A watch party full of kids and adults from the Denver Dream Center will be watching closely.
Royval remembers the impact and joy felt by the kids when he used to bring the LFA flyweight title. The leverage he had to create a competition prize was uncanny. Being able to bring the UFC belt by would raise things to a whole new level.
“I used to let whoever was hitting the hardest or the fastest or whoever is doing the best, hit the belt for the rest of the day and all that stuff,” Royval said. “That’s one of the things that originally brought interest to it, too, to just bringing the belt around. The LFA belt is pretty cool. It’s pretty heavy. It looks legit – but it’s not the UFC belt. It’s not like a real belt in my eyes. So it’ll be real cool to bring that in and continue all those competitions.
Despite the demanding schedule of a UFC title challenger, Royval has always found time for them during this training camp. It’s fulfilled him in ways fighting cannot and helped carve a legacy greater than MMA. It’s not as much about as going far, as it is going together.
“I feel like it’s super important as someone who is kind of making their dreams come true, like, what’s the point in all this if you’re not bringing it into someone else’s life, too?” Royval said. “That was one of the major things I always kind of thought, but now I’m glad I can do exactly what I wanted to do when I left my job or when I was planning to get to the UFC. All the things I’ve wanted to do I’m kind of fulfilling.
“If you’re making your dreams come true and life is good for you, then what’s the purpose of not sharing it with people around you and making things happen to people around you? Why not brighten up someone else’s life? Because otherwise, life would be pretty unfulfilling, right?”
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 296.
