Throughout his career, Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) featherweight Hyder Amil has carried Marin County with him onto the biggest stages in mixed martial arts.
Now, the San Rafael native is investing that experience back into his hometown through Hurricane Athletics and Combat, the gym he opened to train the next generation of fighters—all while continuing to compete at the highest levels of the sport.
Growing up in San Rafael, martial arts was not an obvious path for Amil. He was more interested in art than athletics until a friend persuaded him to join the football team as a freshman at Terra Linda High School. Football didn’t do much to stoke a passion in him, but that season a teammate introduced him to wrestling. “In my first tournament, I won an undefeated medal,” he said. After that, he was hooked.
Discovering his natural talent for combat sports made a deep impression on Amil. Having emigrated from the Philippines with his mother and sister at age six to escape an abusive father, his wrestling prowess was a newfound source of self worth.
“I was pretty underprivileged, so I didn’t have the most confidence,” he explained. “But when I would win in wrestling, I would come home with a first place medal, and it gave me that confidence. It made me think, ‘I am a winner. I don’t care what anyone else says.’” He joined a jiu-jitsu gym and had his first mixed martial arts (MMA) fight when he was 17 and still in high school.
MMA gave Amil purpose, but it didn’t immediately solve his struggles. Feeling different from his peers and carrying anger from a difficult childhood, he often found himself in fights while defending friends and family. After several altercations, he was expelled from Terra Linda High School two months before graduation. “When I got kicked out, my martial arts teacher threw away all my medals I had worked so hard for,” he recalled. “I felt betrayed by everyone.”
After being expelled, Amil wasn’t sure what would come next. “I lost my path for a little bit there,” he said. But after falling in love and moving to Berkeley with his girlfriend, he began to get his life back on track, returning to school and finding work. When he later lost his job and struggled to make rent, he discovered El Niño Training Center in South San Francisco. “When El Niño responded back to me, I took it as a sign from God,” he said. “Let’s see what happens.”
He threw himself into training and lost 50 pounds in two months.
Amil’s professional career began in 2017 at a Dragon House regional event before he went on to fight for Bellator MMA and Legacy Fighting Alliance. After an undefeated 7-0 run, he was invited to fight at Dana White’s Contender Series. He won his match against Emrah Sonmez via unanimous decision and was awarded a UFC contract.
At the same time that Amil was reaching the peak of his fighting career, he was also reaching his mid-30s and starting to look ahead.
“I wanted to invest in something that was going to be worthwhile,” he remembered. He was tired of commuting to the South Bay to train and wanted to put more focus on supporting burgeoning fighters. After stumbling across a vacant space on Second Street in San Rafael, he reached out to his friend and current business partner, Steve Johnson, and asked if he would be interested in opening a gym. When fighters Tony Sangimino and Gavin Hallinan joined the venture, the coaching team at Hurricane Athletics and Combat (HAC) was born.
HAC opened on Jan. 1, 2024. Just one month later, Amil made his UFC debut with a February 10, 2024 undercard match against Fernie Garcia, where he won through a second round technical knockout (TKO).
The momentum didn’t stop there. In his second UFC fight—and first main card fight—on July 20 of the same year, he won in a stunning first round TKO against JeongYeong Lee of South Korea. The finish went viral and was covered in Forbes magazine in an article titled “UFC Vegas 94 Results: Fighter Scores Viral KO Following 38-Punch Combo.”
Writer Brian Mazique wrote, “The UFC’s Apex event on Saturday, July 20 wasn’t packed with huge names, but if you didn’t watch it, chances are you missed one of the most amazing one-minute fights in MMA history.” The win earned Amil the $50,000 “Performance of the Night” bonus—and demonstrated how he had earned the moniker “The Hurricane.”
Amil went on to win via split decision against William Gomis in his third UFC fight on March 1, 2025. Four months later, in late June of 2025, he had his third UFC match against opponent Jose Miguel Delgado. Just 26 seconds into round one, Amil was dropped by a lucky knee. The loss was the first of his career. In November of that year, he fought Jamall Emmers and lost by unanimous decision.
The losses came in the midst of a mysterious illness that had Amil battling severe gastrointestinal problems that left him unable to keep food down and underweight. As a fighter, his natural instinct had been to push through and ignore his physical struggles, but his two losses were a wake-up call.
After months of searching for answers, doctors discovered a stomach ulcer caused by an advanced H. pylori infection—the leading cause of stomach cancer. “If I never lost that fight,” Amil reflected, “I could have gotten cancer in a year or two.” Treatment was difficult, and recovery took months. “For three to four months after that, I was skin and bones,” he said. “Then my weight came back to me; my mind started coming back.”
Through the losses and his health struggles, Amil credits the community at HAC with helping to keep him afloat. “The people who were there for me in my gym, they never left me, and they never cared about [the losses],” he said. “I get emotional talking about it because when I lost, I was like, ‘Damn, what am I?’ They reminded me, ‘You are human; you have more value than just being a fighter.’”
That culture and sense of community is exactly what Amil set out to foster when he decided to open a gym. “Here in my gym, everyone has a place, and that makes it a community,” he noted. “We don’t know what everyone is going through. I call the gym a temple, a place where you can shed your negativity and step out of the gym with positivity.”
Now that Amil is out of the woods both physically and mentally, he’s laser focused on his next UFC bout on June 20. “I’m looking forward to this fight,” he said of his match against fellow featherweight Christian Rodriguez. “This is a really good opponent to show if I’ve learned my lessons or not.” At the same time, he’s supporting younger fighters at HAC, including up and coming competitors Jorge Lara Ruiz and Zachary Chernoff, as well as HAC coach and professional fighter Gavin Hallinan, who are all competing on June 13 at Fight Night at Tech CU Arena in San Jose.
“Honestly, these kids are like my kids,” Amil said of the students at his gym. Laughingly, he added, “I’m like, ‘I adopted you. You guys belong to me now.’” That attitude is what he credits with the gym’s sustained success since opening two and a half years ago. “We’re working on athletics and martial arts, but it’s community based,” he pointed out. “I think that’s why it attracts people.”
Hurricane Athletics and Combat is located 1295 Second St. #1, San Rafael. The gym offers grappling and kids’ mixed martial arts classes, as well as personal training, sports performance training and conditioning. For more information, visit hacmma.com or call 415.895.2680.
