Jeisla Chaves went from holding cards during fights to being the one in the cage trading punches and kicks. Saturday night she makes her UFC debut.
The 29-year-old Chaves grew up in Poçoes, a small town in Bahia, Brazil, and went to school dreaming of one day making a living as a geography teacher. Years went by. She graduated in the area and found a 9-to-5 job. One day, an old school friend reached out asking she if was interested in making some money as a ring girl for a Muay Thai event organized by his coach.
Chaves said yes and opened a door to a new world.
“I traded ring cards for gloves and that’s when everything changed in my life,” Chaves told MMA Fighting ahead of her UFC Vegas 118 flyweight clash with Yuneisy Duben.
Shortly after her start as a ring girl, Chaves fell in love with Muay Thai.
“I had been training for only about a month when my coach, who is still my coach today and runs the promotion where I worked as a ring girl, told me, ‘Next year, you’ll be with me at the event,’” Chaves said. “At first, I thought he meant as a ring girl again. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll be there with you again. I’m glad you liked my work.’ He replied, ‘No, you’ll be there as my fighter.’ In less than a year, I had my first amateur Muay Thai fight at that event and became champion. That was the moment everything changed. I loved it. I knew that was what I wanted for my life.”
Chaves kept working on her Muay Thai skills before joining jiu-jitsu classes to look at a potential transition to MMA, which eventually happened in 2023.
“I worked at events in my hometown and in the area, so some people where I’m from know me both as a ring girl and as a fighter,” Chaves said. “I started training professionally and gave up a lot of things. I quit my job and even had conflicts with my family. It’s not like my mom was against it, but she didn’t support it either because she would see me coming home injured and I was the only girl training at the gym.”
Chaves worked at a shoe factory at the time and passed on a promotion because that would mean moving to a different city and leaving the gym. She also declined a job offer to teach geography at a local school. Chaves never told her mother about those opportunities, but it all turned out for the better in the end as she’s now moments away from making the walk to the octagon as a UFC fighter.
This past September, Chaves earned a contract with the UFC after a three-round bloody war with Sofia Montenegro on Dana White’s Contender Series, a match Chaves won by split decision. UFC signed both athletes, and Chaves feels better prepared now that she will have her original coaches with her in Las Vegas after their visas were denied in 2025.
“That showed me that I’m stronger than I ever imagined,” Chaves said of her experience on DWCS. “I think that fight, if it had happened in the UFC, definitely would have earned us a [Fight of the Night] bonus. It was an amazing fight, exactly the way I like it.”
Chaves expects the same now for her UFC debut against Duben, a Venezuelan athlete who, like Chavez, was 6-0 going into her first bout under the UFC banner before she lost to Carli Judice by first-round knockout.
“I think it’s going to be the kind of fight I love,” Chaves said. “A lot of action, a lot of exchanges and blood, and hopefully something similar to what happened on the Contender Series. I think that’s where the nickname ‘A Braba’ [Badass, in Portuguese] came from. I was always moving forward and trading punches with the men at
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