CHAD RICE

“The best thing about Fort McMurray is its amazing energy.”

Chad Rice is another local man made great. A graduate of Composite High School and Keyano College, Chad found a knack for investing in real estate and has been a local entrepreneur since 2000.

As a sports promoter, his passion, Chad runs Prestige Fighting Championships with local fight guru Sandy Bowman. They made history bringing in the first-ever mixed martial arts event to YMM in 2010. Since then, there have been eight events, all of them well supported and popular.

Originally from White Bay Newfoundland, Chad came here byway of Ontario. He’s done well by the community and he’s happy to indulge his passion by putting on these popular sports events. “MMA is a tough sport, there’s no doubt about it, but it is so heavily regulated that it’s no worse than any other contact sport in terms of participants’ safety,” says Chad.

He and Sandy founded the fight promotion primarily for the love of the sport and to showcase the talent and hard work that goes into being a professional MMA fighter. Chad has always been the planner, who has a passion for taking on big jobs (like the design of their state of the art martial arts facility), planning them, and being proud of the end result.

They only ever had one tournament postponed. “It was supposed to be in June of 2016,” said Chad, “but the community had other things on its mind at the time.” Still, they managed to put it on in August, less than two months later, and the fighting spirit was reflected in the card that evening with a large contingent of locals getting down and dirty in the ring. Here’s to many more successes.