Watch: Joanna Jedrzejczyk and Sean Strickland Go Snowboarding
Alongside UFC stars Joanna Jedrzejczyk and Sean Strickland, Helen Yee went snowboarding with two people who actually know how to do it, and spent most of the time sitting down instead. The sports journalist showed up at Brian Head ski resort in Utah and admitted straight away that she’s barely done this before, maybe high school, and that barely counts.
Snowboarding with Joanna Jedrzejczyk and Sean Strickland
“I stand up on my snowboard and I’m not scared until I’m scared,” Yee said, describing that precise moment when you realize the hill is moving faster than your feet can handle. She dropped hands-first into the snow and spent about ten minutes crawling down the bunny hill.
Sean Strickland, the UFC middleweight who got married in October 2025, turned into an unlikely coach. He told Yee during the chairlift ride to stop overthinking it. “Whenever you go down, you’re going to put your board straight and you’re just going to go straight,” Strickland said. His whole approach was stripped down, rotate your body, step behind the back binding, point yourself downhill, keep it straight. When Yee pushed back about falling, Strickland shrugged it off: “Nothing happens.”
Joanna Jedrzejczyk, the former UFC strawweight champion who retired in 2022, made it look impressively easy. Yee watched her glide down and said, “You already look pro, Joanna. I feel like you’ve been doing this for years.” Jedrzejczyk just laughed. The Polish fighter, born in 1987, held the strawweight title with five successful defenses and only recently stepped away from fighting.
The conversation got real when Yee brought up that Strickland had just gotten married. Jedrzejczyk mentioned his recent wedding, which sparked her going off about the predictable life questions women get asked. “When you get engaged, they ask you when you’re going to get married. When you get married, they ask you about first, second, third baby. Like, what the [expletive]?” she said.
Brian Head sits at 9,600 feet elevation in Southern Utah and gets over 360 inches of snow a year. It’s supposed to be beginner-friendly, though that description didn’t help Yee much. She kept stopping halfway down runs, hands in the snow, while Joanna and Sean disappeared toward the bottom.
Strickland tried to be encouraging about the learning curve. “It takes so long,” he said, then added a warning about how “frustrating” snowboarding turns out to be.
