With each jarring thud to the midsection, Iesha Kenney lets out a deep groan. Hair in a frizzy bun with black shorts dangling over her bright blue socks, Kenney lies on the gym’s floor, surrounded by a circle of chiseled male onlookers as she braces for punishing body shots from the 25-pound medicine ball wielded by her trainer.
When Kenney wandered into the gym at Charles Houston Recreation Center in Alexandria six years ago, it was supposed to be a distraction from life’s painful blows. There, she wouldn’t have to think about why her father had bounced in and out of her life, why her mother had to support her family on welfare during a year of unemployment or why her older brother and best friend died at the age of 18.
But now Kenney, a 17-year-old junior at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, has become a legitimate contender in the Olympics’ newest sport, women’s boxing. She has won eight junior and youth national titles and after competing in this week’s International Boxing Association Women’s Junior/Youth World Championships in Taiwan in the 165-pound weight class, Kenney is expected to take part in June’s U.S. Olympic trials qualifier, where berths in the Olympic trials for next summer’s Games in Rio de Janeiro will be up for grabs.
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“If she works at it, she can do it,” said Claressa Shields, 20, who won gold at the 2012 London Olympics, where women’s boxing made its debut. “I think she likes boxing and takes it seriously. But for her age, you have to be that much more dedicated and think there’s always someone else out there training to be the best.”
That attitude is what propels Kenney, who was named after a Power Rangers character and regularly works out in superhero attire, to put her 5-foot-9, 160-pound frame through a brutal test of wills at the close of a recent evening session — 30 body shots courtesy of her Alexandria Boxing Club trainer.
The first 10 hits to the stomach do little to faze her, or so it seems. But as the weighted ball smashes once, twice, three times into her left kidney, spitting grains of sand on impact, Kenney laughs nervously. Then she turns on her other side to welcome 10 final hits before rolling out of harm’s way.
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“It’s fun watching it,” Kenney said through a forced smile. “It’s not fun doing it.”
The pain will subside, but Kenney’s burgeoning passion for boxing hasn’t.
“I never thought I’d stick with it,” she said. “It just happened.”
T.C. Williams junior boxer Iesha Kenney eyes a spot in the Olympics
Iesha Kenney, 17, has spent the past six years showing why she belongs among the world’s top female boxers.
‘This is not no girl’
At first, boxing was just something to do.
Kenney’s father had moved out when she was 6, and with her mother, Wanda, working long hours to make ends meet for her, her brother and three cousins, Kenney had grown tired of watching television at home.
Soon after the remodeled Charles Houston Recreation Center opened in 2008, of all the rooms Kenney toured, she and her friend chose the boxing gym as the ideal place to camp out in the corner and read books.
Kenney’s friend soon began training with Dennis Porter, who has headed the Alexandria Boxing Club for more than 20 years. It wasn’t long before boxer-turned-trainer Kay Koroma took the quiet 11-year-old Kenney under his wing.
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Koroma had been down this road before, training a novice female fighter, until instability at home and an unplanned pregnancy derailed her career.
“With Iesha it was like, do I want to take this on again, to train another girl and put my heart into it?” Koroma said. “I saw that she was serious, and when she first stepped into the ring to spar, I said, this is not no girl. She’s actually fighting the boys back, no eyes closed or anything like that. She’s actually doing what we told her to do, and it was like, wow, maybe we got something here.”
Kenney’s life wasn’t completely devoid of the pitfalls that doomed Koroma’s last female pupil. When Kenney was 10, Wanda lost her job. As her mother’s unemployment stretched to a year and one of her cousins had a child, the family, receiving minimal aid from Kenney’s father, was forced to go on welfare.
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“Regardless of what her father does or doesn’t do, I’m going to make sure she gets what she needs,” said Wanda, who works as a cashier at Safeway. “When they was smaller, Iesha was in a dance group, and he could never show up. If he feel the need to, sometimes he’d show up. So it was habit that we were used to him not showing up. And when he do show up, it’s not good.”
Kenney calls her relationship with her father “complicated,” a byproduct of the many broken promises and infrequent visits, even though they live about a mile apart on Alexandria’s west side. Her local boxing club family has filled the void.
Koroma serves as “her dad,” stern at times while coddling her at others, at least in the eyes of some who enter the red, white and blue ropes with Kenney. He knows how to motivate her, once shrewdly toggling with Kenney’s competitive spirit during the last round of her fourth fight.
“Kay says, ‘You’re losing. What are you going to do about it?’” said Kenney. “I’m like, ‘Aaahh, I don’t know,’ and I start crying and panicking because I hate to lose. So I went out there and got a standing eight-count on the girl.”
‘Like a cartoon character’
The dread of defeat has served as a driving force for Kenney, but staying hungry can be a challenge in the wobbly world of women’s boxing. Before she qualified to compete for Team USA by winning the first of three titles at the junior and youth open national championships in 2013, it took nearly three years for Kenney to find an age-appropriate opponent in her weight class. And even then, she had to bend the rules, settling for a 2011 New Jersey exhibition against a seasoned 22-year-old. Kenney, only 14 at the time, won by second-round stoppage.
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“There are no girls in Virginia, like, at all,” Kenney said. “And there’s something about going to a tournament and not fighting. On one hand, I don’t have the time. And then you’re like, ‘I did all this work for nothing.’”
With the sport’s introduction at the 2012 Olympics, a new pinnacle was created — one that many in the boxing community believe Kenney can reach. But despite growing numbers, a stigma still looms over the idea of women boxing.
“One thing you have to accept as a woman in a male-dominated industry, any time you go out there, you’re representing all women,” said Dara Shen, a USA Boxing national champion and Kenney’s mentor at the Alexandria Boxing Club. “If they see a bad performance, they will think women are bad. If they see us and see good things, people will think women are good. We carry that on our backs every time we get in the ring, and I think Iesha understands that.”
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In embracing that burden, Kenney doesn’t neglect who she is, a fun-loving teenager with a long imagination and a promising future.
At events, many mistake her as a fan, puzzled as to why a fighter would pass the time between bouts burying her bespectacled face in a young adult fiction book. She used to play the violin, but she recently gave it up so she could focus more on her desire to study chemical engineering. And while other girls her age are into wearing makeup, Kenney’s accessories include a Pokemon belt, Batman socks or her Superman outfit, red velcro cape included.
“I’m not even sure she’s aware that when she walks around, she’s like a cartoon character,” Alexandria club middleweight boxer Antoine Douglas said with a laugh. “She’s always joking, always happy. But when she’s in the ring, you see a different side of her.”
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No one understood that dichotomy better than her older brother, Albert. He was the one who had named her after the yellow Power Ranger, and as Albert battled a heart condition that required multiple surgeries, Kenney grew to admire her brother’s strength.
When Albert developed the flu and, subsequently, an infection on his heart valve that required another operation in February 2012, Kenney assumed he would pull through as always. But three days later, just after she had returned from winning the Silver Gloves tournament in Missouri, Kenney’s uncle came by school to pick her up early.
“You know how in the back of your head you think something’s happened, but you don’t want to admit it to yourself?” Kenney said of the memory that still brings tears to her eyes. “When he came to get me, I knew something was up.”
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Upon Kenney’s arrival at the hospital, the then-14-year-old learned that her brother had died because of complications from the surgery.
“They were real close, and he would come up to the gym and watch her,” Wanda said. “They told her she could take more time off from the gym, but she wanted to go back. Boxing gave her someone to talk to and a way to work it out.”
Following a week away from the ring, Kenney returned, fueled by what she deems a “subconscious motivation.” During a breakout campaign in 2013, Kenney earned her first international gold medal at the Pirkka Tournament in Finland, a feat recognized by Alexandria’s mayor in a special city hall ceremony that May. She also captured gold in the 132-pound lightweight division at the USA Boxing Junior Olympic National Championships that year.
Heart of a champion
But even the girl decked out in superhero clothing, the one with a career record of 18-2, has her kryptonite. A few months later, both injury and defeat that have driven Kenney’s recent training occurred at the 2013 AIBA Women’s Junior/Youth World Championships in Bulgaria. After suffering a bruise on her right biceps in a previous fight, Kenney overcompensated in the semifinal round, causing tendinitis to flare up in her left shoulder during a resounding loss.
“It’s awful to lose. Just awful,” Kenney said “They said I lost unanimous, but there’s no way; it was really close. I couldn’t throw anything on my left side. I couldn’t throw my jab. Well, I could, but there was nothing behind it.”
Her ability to absorb the pain just to finish the fight is why she has earned the respect of her peers. Kenney is far from the quickest or most athletic fighter at the Alexandria Boxing Club, but her drive, as much as her heavy-handed jab, separates her from the pack.
It’s the same drive that’s yielded a 3.9 GPA in Advanced Placement and honors classes at T.C. Williams, where she has maneuvered around her busy schedule and endured her personal heartaches to extend her potential far beyond the ring.
“If she wins [an Olympic] gold medal, she’ll be on top,” Porter said. “But she has education to fall back on, and I actually think boxing is sometimes a hobby for her because ... she’ll be successful at whatever she does.”
For now, Kenney’s focus will be on succeeding at this week’s tournament in Taiwan. As was the case during her last appearance at the event, her shoulder remains sore, threatening to jeopardize her quest for vengeance. Fortunately for Kenney, pain is a feeling she has learned to stomach.
“You really see the heart of a boxer when they have no gas left, and you see what they do with what they’ve got,” Shen said. “Some people just give up. But there’s no hiding in the ring; they show who they are with no words. With Iesha, you can see the heart in her.”
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