CAREER NOTES

Liz Carmouche is an American women's flyweight and one of the most consequential figures in the history of women's mixed martial arts. Known as Girl Rilla, she fights out of San Diego, California, and trains at The Arena. Carmouche competed in the first women's bout the UFC ever held, and she has challenged for world titles in two weight classes. She is a former Bellator women's flyweight world champion and a PFL World Tournament winner at women's flyweight. She has competed for the UFC, for Bellator and for PFL, and she has fought for championship stakes in all three. Her reputation rests on grappling, durability and a career that has outlasted most of the fighters she came up alongside. She remains one of the highest ranked flyweights on the PFL roster.

Carmouche came to combat sports after five years in the United States Marine Corps, and she turned professional in an era before the largest organizations in the sport had women's divisions at all. She built her name on the American regional circuit before reaching the UFC, where she fought for world titles at bantamweight and at flyweight. She later moved to Bellator and captured the women's flyweight world title, defending it three times before that roster was folded into PFL. Her game starts with wrestling and clinch work, chaining takedown entries into top position and punishing opponents with ground and pound from dominant angles. She is comfortable in scrambles and aggressive hunting submissions, and she has closed fights with chokes, with armbars and with strikes. The through line is pressure, and opponents tend to feel it most in the later rounds.

Carmouche is a grinder in the best sense, a fighter who wins by making every exchange expensive and every position uncomfortable. Her career includes fights with Ronda Rousey, Valentina Shevchenko, Jessica Andrade and Miesha Tate, a list of opponents that few fighters in the sport can match. She took the Bellator women's flyweight world title by stoppage and defended it three times, including a late stoppage of a former champion. She added PFL World Tournament gold at women's flyweight with a third round stoppage, having come up short at the same stage a year earlier. Her most recent win came by second round guillotine choke, proof that the submission game is still live. She has spent more than a decade as a measuring stick in two weight classes, and she is still fighting at the top of one of them.