MARANA — There is a moment in Louis Maldonado's gym when everything clicks — when a young woman in a wheelchair throws a punch, hears her instructor cheer, and realizes for the first time that she is stronger than anyone ever gave her credit for.
That moment happens every week at Glory Combat in Marana.
And for three sisters, it is changing everything.
Ramya, Deena and Madi Veprek started training with Maldonado because they wanted to feel safe in a world that does not always make that easy.
Ramya and Madi both have spina bifida. Deena has brittle bone disease. All three use wheelchairs. And according to their mom, Jamie Veprek, the odds are not in their favor, at least not on paper.
"I think the statistic is 70% of individuals with disabilities say that during their lifetime, they've experienced some sort of attack or aggression," Veprek said.
That number stopped her cold. Not because she was surprised, but because she recognized it as a call to action.
Veprek had taken a women's self-defense class with Maldonado herself, and she walked out of that gym feeling something she had not expected.
"I felt like it was empowering, but it also gave you really practical tools for if I walk out the door and someone grabs me, I know what to do and how to handle myself," Veprek said.
She thought about her daughters. She thought about the world they were growing up in and the world they were about to step further into as young adults. And she knew she had to give them what she had found.
When she brought the idea to Glory Combat, Maldonado said yes without hesitation.
He did not walk into that first class unprepared. He went home, pulled up a chair, sat down in it, and started thinking.
"I put myself in their shoes and I was like, what am I going to teach?" Maldonado said.
He drilled through every technique he had learned across 50 years of teaching martial arts. He asked himself what would work, what would not, and what these three young women truly needed. What he built was not a modified version of someone else's class. It was something entirely new, designed from the ground up with Ramya, Deena and Madi in mind.
The training covers everything from using their voices to de-escalate a threat, to cardio and strength work, to learning how to defend themselves both in and out of their chairs.
They work with sticks for coordination, punch pads rigged specifically for them, and lift weights to build the kind of upper body power that can stop someone in their tracks.
Most recently, the class added ground defense, because Maldonado thinks about every scenario, including the ones no one wants to imagine.
He is not just teaching them to fight. He is teaching them to believe in themselves.
"My job is to develop the physical, the mental and emotional, and to build that confidence within that person," Maldonado said.
For a man who says he is nearing the end of his career, this class has become something deeply personal. He talks about it with a quiet gratitude — like he knows he stumbled into exactly the place he was supposed to be.
"A lot of people don't have this opportunity," he said. "Hopefully it grows. People might see us and say, let's go see if we could do it."
And the sisters? After 8 weeks, they are already feeling different.
"Going here and doing classes really helped a lot with confidence and skills and stuff," the girls agreed.
It shows up outside the gym too. In the way they carry themselves. In the awareness they bring to every room they enter.
These are young women who go to concerts, spend time with friends, paint, do crafts and live full, joyful lives. They have played wheelchair basketball, done ballet and tried baseball. They have never let their wheelchairs define what they are capable of, and now they have the training to back that up.
"I want them to go out with confidence and know that they can handle themselves," Jamie Veprek said. "That they're not an easy target, and that they can dispel those misconceptions that people have of them, and have the confidence to go and live their lives."
These three sisters are proving that strength is about far more than what people see.
Families interested in adaptive or other self-defense classes at Glory Combat in Marana can find more information at glorycsf.com
