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Zachary Reese | All Gas, No Brakes
Texas-Native Zachary Reese Is Feeling More And More Comfortable In The Octagon Ahead Of His Fight In San Antonio
Texas will always be in the heart and soul of Zachary Reese, particularly his hometown of Shiner, but when it comes to fight camps for the rest of his career, you can call him a Las Vegan.
“I'm going to be out here for the remainder of my fighting career, for sure,” said Reese, who meets Sedriques Dumas this Saturday on the Noche UFC card in San Antonio. “I found such a good home over here, and I get to train with Sean Strickland five days a week, so I can't ask for a better partner and a better team. Today, I trained with Paulo Costa, and the previous week or two weeks, Roman Dolidze and Caio Borralho. So yeah, it's been awesome.”
It's his second camp in the fight capital of the world, the first resulting in a three-round win over Dusko Todorovic in May, and while it’s tough being away from his wife and kids, he makes sure to fly home on weekends before returning in time for Monday practice. That’s the price you pay sometimes to get the right work with the right people at the right time. Reese has been doing this for a while now, with the trips away from Texas going to Thailand instead of Las Vegas, and even when living at home full-time, there were long drives to get training sessions in throughout the Lone Star State. And now, he realizes that despite the three letters on his gloves, it’s still just a fight.
Zachary Reese Fight Week Interview | Noche UFC
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Zachary Reese Fight Week Interview | Noche UFC
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“It does feel that way, especially the third round of my last fight,” said Reese. “I wasn't stoked on the performance, but we won it at the end of the day, and that's obviously number one. But yeah, it feels like the UFC's home. You expect it, as a fighter, to maybe feel different, but it just feels like my regional fights; it feels all the same. Whether it was in a Holiday Inn in front of a hundred people, or it's at the APEX in front of a hundred people, or it's a big crowd of thousands of people, it really does feel the same for me.”
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That must have been some fight in the Holiday Inn. Reese laughs, then describes an even more bizarre location for a fistfight.
“I had a kickboxing smoker at a gym, and it was just on the mats,” he recalls. “I fought this guy who's like 300 pounds, and when we’d get to the edge of the mats, he would push me into the crowd. He does it once, he does it twice, and on the third time he pushes me into the crowd, I fall on a guy in a wheelchair. So I'm sitting on a guy in a wheelchair and this guy's trying to punch me, so I'm trying to punch him, and it ends up in this brawl. And then I got a little white trash. He tried to sucker punch me, so then I tried to fight him in the parking lot and it spilled out into that. And then it was a bit of a s**t show. But yeah, that's probably the funniest place I've fought.”
I could hear stories like that all day, and while you don’t hear them too much since the sport became mainstream, there are a few stragglers from the up and coming generation who have seen what happens when regulation isn’t exactly the top priority.
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“When I got into MMA, the first pay-per-view I watched was BJ Penn and Diego Sanchez, and then Forrest Griffin and Anderson Silva,” said Reese. “Even how we trained back then, it was just dumb. We would just go fight each other. Literally, somebody would get knocked out in sparring. It was just a different time, man, a different time.”
It was as old school as it gets, and while times have changed for the better when it comes to health and safety, guys like Reese’s teammates Strickland and Chris Curtis embrace the mentality that when you’re in the gym, the more you sweat, the less you bleed.
“You’ve got (coach) Eric Nicksick, obviously he's been in the game forever, you’ve got Ray Sefo in the gym teaching, Randy Couture's dropped in, so I do like that it's got that hard-nosed approach,” he said. “I think everyone at Xtreme spars pretty smart, but yeah, there's going to be times where you're not feeling it or you're having a rough day and you just bite down your mouthpiece and get to work. I do enjoy it. I enjoy the intensity of it.”
Reese is bringing that intensity to San Antonio and aiming for a better result than his first UFC fight in his home state, a 2023 loss to Cody Brundage in Austin.
“I can't wait,” he said. “I’ve got so many people coming out, all my buddies, and it's going to be awesome. I trained a lot in San Antonio, too, and when I heard they were coming to Texas, I was just begging and pleading to fight there. I'm coming with aggression, man. All gas, no brakes, for sure.”
Noche UFC: Lopes vs Silva took place live Frost Bank Center in San Antonio, Texas on September 13,2025. See the final Prelim & Main Card Results, Official Scorecards and Who Won Bonuses - and relive the action on UFC FIGHT PASS!
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