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Coaches welcome Jamaica Boxing Association’s coaching clinic
Written by Sports Desk. Posted in Boxing. | 01 February 2025 | 231 Views
Tags: jamaica boxing association

The twenty coaches who participated in the Jamaica Boxing Association’s (JBA) one day coaching clinic on Wednesday at the Stanley Couch Gym in Parade Gardens, were very pleased after receiving their certificate of participation and with the information imparted to them by Canadian sports performance coach Ava Sturm. 

Coach Odean Taylor of Fit Like a Fighter Initiative in Portmore endorsed the clinic.

"The session was very informative. We were taken back to basics, where we were taught (along with) and a demonstration was done of things that we can incorporate easily in our training sessions to help with creating a little bit more baseline of where to start with new fighters or persons who are just starting out with boxing." 

"One of the things she was talking about mostly, is the Jab, how the rotation of the body is important, where the shoulder is positioned, where the fist is positioned, where to aim with the arm that is throwing the jab, how your body should be aligned, (and) all of those things just from jabbing. So, she showed us the different steps to go through, to identify these things then making sure that we correct the misconceptions or the incorrect forms, to make sure that they are throwing the jabs the correct way" said Taylor. 

Sturm was pleased with how the coaches received the information imparted during the session.

"Everyone is so professional and everyone is so engaged today and there are people asking questions and they received me very well. I feel like their progression from learning today, everything went very smoothly and I'm really excited for what the future holds for all of these coaches." 

Stephen 'Bomber' Jones, president of the Jamaica Boxing Association said that the clinic is intended to help the coaches in a number of ways including preparing boxers for the JBA’s Gloves Over Guns (GOG) Futures Initiative of monthly boxing fight cards, high school boxing and the Road to 2028 Olympics. 

"Most of them (coaches) or half of them, at least, are already coaches and the other half would be those that are mentors in certain areas, or physical education teachers in certain schools that want to bring boxing into their program.”

“So, they want to bring the discipline that we have been instilling in the participants that take part in the futures program that take place monthly, the gloves over guns mentorship that we have weekly, and so they've been asking, making requests on how we can get other schools involved which works for us cause it's been our goal our number one priority to get boxing into more schools, because we believe that's how we'll instill more transformation in community. And the other side now would be that we are now a national federation affiliated with World Boxing (WB), which is the international federation leading towards the road to the Olympics, governing bodies for federations worldwide, and they have stipulated that we have to have national level coaches on our databases that they can track, as well as us tracking them.” 

The first Gloves Over Guns Futures Initiative fight card is scheduled for Saturday February 22 at the Stanley Couch Gym.