Coaches welcome JBA’s coaching clinic

The 20 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 certificates of participation and the information imparted to them by Canadian sports performance coach Ava Sturm.

Coach Odean Taylor of Fit Like a Fighter Initiative in Portmore was among the first to endorse the clinic.

“The session was very informative. We were taken back to basics and a demonstration was done of things that we can incorporate easily in our training sessions.

“She spoke about the effectiveness of 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. So she showed us the different steps to go through, to identify these things and 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. 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 JBA, said the clinic is intended to help the coaches in a number of ways including preparing boxers for the JBA’s Gloves Over Guns 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 coaching 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 programmes. They want to bring the discipline that we have been instilling in the participants that take part in the monthly futures programme and the Gloves Over Guns mentorship that we have weekly into the schools. It has been our goal, our number one priority, to get boxing into more schools, because we believe that’s how we’ll get more transformation in communities. We are now a national federation affiliated with World Boxing, which is the international federation responsible for qualification to the Olympics and they have stipulated that we must have national level coaches on our databases that they can track,” Jones said.

The first Gloves Over Guns Futures Initiative fight card for 2025 is scheduled for Saturday, February 22 at the Stanley Couch Gym.