Absolutely man! I totally get it, and I think it's awesome to have a variety of types of BJJ club and teaching/grading methods around to fit everyone's wants and needs :) Apparently when BJJ first started, not only were there no stripes and it took forever to grade, but there were also finite numbers allowed for belts, so to grade up from white to blue, you also had to wait for a blue belt space to be vacated by someone grading up to purple, and so on. Intense!

By "past life", I didn't mean it literally haha! I just used that phrase because my first venture into BJJ was so long ago now that it seems/feels like a past life to me. I trained from 2000-2004, starting when I was about 21 years old, competed twice, got a bronze medal in one of them, and got my blue belt sometime in my third year. But then the academy closed down unfortunately, and I had nowhere to train anymore, so I had to stop training for a period of almost exactly 10 years due to having no accessible options. I then resumed training BJJ again via Gracie University on mats in my garage with a friend in late 2014, and continued training like that until early 2018. We passed our Combatives belt grading via Gracie University online (filmed 5 grading test videos each and emailed them to Gracie HQ in California), and we trained in the Master Cycle (blue belt stripe 1 curriculum) for about 2 years.

And now I train at a Gracie certified training centre. I was welcome to continue wearing a Combatives belt, or even a blue belt given that I'd earned one before, but I chose to start from the start again as a zero stripe white belt, because it's a perishable skill set, and I no longer felt that I was skilled or able enough to justify wearing either a blue or Combatives belt. Plus, I just love the process, and love getting a good handle on the basics.
Given that there's no rolling/sparring at this academy until after you have your blue belt, and I'm certainly not entering any competitions anymore, there's no problem with me starting from the start again as a white belt, and I'm also always completely open and transparent with my instructors and training partners about the level of my past training experience. This process of starting over from the start again was the reason for starting this blog actually, as I wanted to document the journey, and I've documented my BJJ story so far in my earlier posts if you're interested :)