The sport of boxing has a widely diverse community, and on campus the club is filled with a lot of different types of people. There are people with backgrounds in fighting, people with no fighting background with minimal knowledge and those in between.
Despite those differences, everyone involved has a lot of respect for one another. There are no rivalries. They are all just one team, working to grow as people, bonding over a common interest, to get their energy out in a healthy way.
“My favorite part of boxing is the combination of mental and physical strength that it helps you build,” member Caiden Easlick said. “Boxing is just as much a sport of the mind as it is of the body.”
Davidov started the club originally because he saw that there was a Jiu-Jitsu club and a martial arts group, but there wasn’t anything related to MMA or boxing in general. He has been boxing since his sophomore year of high school, so when he saw that there was nothing like it, he decided to create something instead. Davidov and Seth Kosky, his best friend and vice president, created the idea together for the club.
Davidov has many ideas for the club and he wants to start implementing them into the meetings at some point. He thinks feedback and input are good for organizations like this to succeed because you can’t build something for anyone without the blocks of a community.
“It’s like a project,” Davidov said. “It starts with just an idea and it grows into being a thing, and now more and more is being added. We’ve seen a lot of success, a lot of our members are really happy with where the club’s at.”
The Whitewater Boxing Club has meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Within the first hour, they have a class with coaches giving instructions on their many different drills and then the second hour of time is sectioned off so members have the ability to train on their own or with other students with the open mats.
This semester, the club has gotten a bag to use for their exercises, which has given more members opportunities to do things they didn’t get to last semester when the club first started.
“The first year was really just figuring out operations, how we wanted to run the club, what members wanted out of the club,” head coach and president of the Boxing Club, Adam Davidov said. “Now, with all the experience and everything that we learned from the first year, we’re able to basically buff out all the edges.”
One of those edges they have started working on has been an equipment upgrade. The bags and pads for the workouts cost more than the club can afford currently, so Davidov started to charge a $50 fee to join the club after the first two free classes.
This fee is for the cost of equipment and the different coaches that do seminars and lessons for what they specialize in. They mostly focus on boxing, but there are sessions for Muay Thai, MMA fighting and other martial arts that are not found in Whitewater already.
The training of this club takes place in Esker Dining Hall, room 108. There are two free classes for every new member. You can check out more information on their Instagram page: @uwwhitewaterboxing.
“It’s never too late,” secretary Travis Gargulak said. “Don’t be scared to try something new.”
