WVU club creates 5 boxing champions
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Steven Ware advanced across the sparring ring, pivoting and bobbing with his gloves high, closing the distance with a boxer who outweighed him by 60 pounds.
Giving away substantial reach, too, he took an occasional jab or straight cross smacking his headgear, but got inside and landed a few punches and made cruiserweight Craig Frazee miss with several hooks.
“I’ve got some things I need to work on,” Ware said afterward. “I’m coming off, off the side.”
He needed to stay inside with his pivots, he said.
Ware is coming off winning the National Collegiate Boxing Association championship at 132 pounds for West Virginia University, where he out-decisioned a West Point fighter in the April final. He was WVU’s fifth national champion in the past five years in a club sport started by students only a decade ago.
At West Virginia, which draws thousands to Division I football and basketball games, boxers train in off-campus gyms and compete in relative obscurity. The NCAA dropped boxing after 1960. That year, Wisconsin’s Charlie Mohr died from a brain hemorrhage a week after the defending champion was knocked down and stopped in the 165-pound title bout.
Collegiate boxing has made a comeback without the NCAA.
WVU competes in the 34-team NCBA that formed in 1976 and includes the often dominant major military academies, where boxers get experience rising through intramurals and then compete against other colleges. The United States Intercollegiate Boxing Association, formed in 2012, has listed 21 registered college clubs and individual students from other local clubs compete. Both now have women’s divisions and hold national tournaments.
“There’s a statistic in 2007 we looked up to help our cause with the university because we got some friction from the university” about safety, said Patrick McLaughlin, an assistant boxing coach for WVU. “So we pulled some stats. In that year, amateur boxing was the 75th ranked amateur sport in injuries.”
“Concussions are a huge concern,” McLaughlin said. “It’s definitely dangerous, but I think they’ve made a lot of rule changes and things that make it a safer sport. I think it’s pretty effective.”
McLaughlin, who had a background in karate, and another student filed the paperwork to start the club. He said his interest was sparked by the critically panned 1987 movie “Teen Wolf Too,” in which Jason Bateman plays a teen who gets a college scholarship from a boxing coach who hopes to take advantage of his supernatural werewolf abilities in the ring.
Now a public school counselor, McLaughlin runs workouts at a gym in an old shopping mall for a mix of amateurs, including Ware. The WVU team trains mainly under head coach Brandon Lyall at a recently built community center where other club sports have space.
There have been other coaches, including a WVU Medicine doctor who had been national champion of Belarus, and a former California Golden Gloves heavyweight champion who got an unrelated job transfer to West Virginia, McLaughlin said. The team’s first two national champions were women.
Ware, now 28, is finishing a bachelor’s degree and plans to teach physical education, first showed up in 2012. He’d been driving a forklift at a sawmill for a few years, helping his single mother pay off some debt, after high school in a small town outside Elkins, West Virginia, he said.
The sawmill shut down. He came to the Morgantown gym for jiu-jitsu, met McLaughlin and started boxing.
“He taught me how to fight as a short guy,” said Ware, who’s 5-foot5. “That’s how I fell in love with boxing.”