Mackenzie Dern liked the pressure of being undefeated but her mindset remains strong

Mackenzie Dern won’t let her first pro loss faze her.

After winning her first two UFC bouts, Dern (7-1 MMA, 2-1 UFC) was bounced out of the ranks of the unbeaten when she suffered a unanimous decision loss to Amanda Ribas this past October.

Although Dern is still young in the sport, the jiu-jitsu star doesn’t see her first blemish necessarily relieving the pressure she had coming into the sport.

In fact, she liked it.

“For me, I like being undefeated,” Dern told MMA Junkie. “I like the pressure. For me, the pressure is like, ‘OK, yeah, everyone is watching, everyone wants me to win, I have to prove them right or prove them wrong.’ The more you’re winning, the more people want to see you get taken down, the more they put you to fight, the more they – just sponsors and everything … so for me, the loss definitely wasn’t good. I would prefer that this loss come a little bit more in the future, but it is what it is.

“It didn’t change too much for me in my mind as a person, but I know that for a lot of the other people it changed a little bit. But that’s what we’ve got to do. We’ve got to use it and take it and try and forget about it.”

Dern returned just four months after having her first child, and though it’s a relatively quick turnaround, she offers no excuses for her loss to Ribas.

“I think I was ready to go that night,” Dern said. “Amanda was better than me on that day, so all the credit to her. If it was an injury, sooner or later I’d have to come back after an injury – if I had a knee surgery or whatever – so I think the fact that it was a pregnancy and people think that a pregnancy is way worse than an injury or something like that, so they think that’s why I lost.”

Looking to get back in the win column, Dern faces Hannah Cifers on Saturday at UFC on ESPN 9, which takes place at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas. The event airs on ESPN and streams on ESPN+.

And naturally, she expects her strength in grappling to be the biggest difference.

“Definitely the ground,” Dern said. “I think at least from the fights that I saw of her on the ground, I think that’s more of her weaker spot and obviously that’s my strongest spot so I wanna play in my strongest spot. But thankfully she’s such a tough girl, she has a lot of fights in the UFC so I was able to see a lot of her fights because there’s tons of them.”