Box Clever

Aim

To support our young boxers get back to peak performance after lockdown and to continue their journey in the sport of boxing

Who we are

At our heart, St Monica’s Boxing Club was established to support, promote and encourage local, young people to excel in the sport of Boxing.

We are a friendly and welcoming boxing club situated in Newry and we hold a proud history of coaching, training and inspiring people of all abilities to experience the thrill of the art of boxing.

Our club is open to everyone. We welcome anyone from complete beginners all the way through to professional boxers who are regularly using the gym. 

With the support of countless organisations and individuals, over the years, we have managed to build and maintain a club with fantastic facilities and a fantastic spirit of pride in our people.

Community impact

Over the last number of years our membership has continued to grow. However, Covid-19 really slowed our progress in developing our member numbers further. Additionally, boxing was one of the last sports to come out of lockdown. This had meant we lost two entire competition and training seasons. 

This loss deprived the club of not only vital income and the ability to recruit new members but left members, coaches and volunteers kept away from a sport they loved.

A number of our members did not return after lockdown and quite a few more came back with clear signs of de-motivation, some with stress and anxiety and a fair number struggled to fully enjoy the social aspect of our club.

We want to take time and make the effort to 're-introduce' ourselves, our facilities and our capabilities to our wider community. We want to encourage more people to regard the club as an essential aspect of their lives. We want more and more of our friends and neighbours to regard us as an environment to develop and maintain a healthy lifestyle.

Why are we crowdfunding?

With Covid, several significant lockdowns and now the current ‘Cost of Living Crisis’ the club and our members are struggling financially. We cannot turn the fortunes of our club around overnight, but with support from our generous supporters, allied to the potential support from Sport NI, we have an opportunity to take a significant step forward. 

There is an opportunity to begin to rebuild and an opportunity to re-energise not only our club, our members, their wider family, but to re-imagine how our club can be used by other partners and our local community.

Unfortunately, we often find ourselves not able to develop new projects and programmes to help the club grow and offer our members more opportunities within the club. That is the reason we are asking our 'crowd' to help us fundraise.

How we’ll spend the money raised

We always feel it is vital to be transparent about how we intend to spend the money we raise. As a charitable organisation, this is one of our core duties. through this appeal we are raising money from our community to put in place several core programmes:

360 Fitness  

Promoting the wider benefits of adopting healthier habits and delivering fitter families. As part of an all-round fitness programme, club members, individuals from the wider local community, families of current members, previous/ lapsed members and so forth would be welcome to drop into 12 weeks of taster sessions. These free sessions would include support for individuals by offering:

12 x Positive mental health outcomes through mindfulness sessions and coping strategies, hosted by mental health and mindfulness practitioners 

10 x Nutritional and dietary sessions in partnership with the Southern Regional College

12 x Directed physical activity sessions based on individual requirements & objectives, directed by our own qualified fitness coaches and trainers 

Specialist fitness and coaching for our boxers

By focussing on our existing members, we hope to reimagine how they approach training in the lead up to competitions. By putting in place specialist sessions with a specialist Strength and Conditioning Coach, we complement our own in-house knowledge and experience.

This would include, but not be limited to 

Pyramid Jab Drills

Integrate Progressive Intervals Into sessions 

Use AMRAP (As Many Rounds as Possible) Training

The ‘Domino Effect’ Drill

Saturation Drills

Swinging Ball Drills

High-Intensity Interval Training sessions (HIIT)

Ringcraft

This will help improve stamina, offer separate strength and speed training for delivering short, high-intensity activity, and a focus on warmups and warming down to aid injury prevention as well as focussing on tactics to speed up recovery time from injuries

Development of our girl’s squad

Female participants will be encouraged to take up boxing through introductory taster sessions. These will be a mix of non-contact techniques such as dance, yoga, boxfit, boxercise Shadow Boxing, Pilates, self-defence, basic martial arts and of course boxing.

The club will open on a ‘girls-only’ basis on specific sessions and be led by a qualified female boxing coach for 12 weeks. There will be a nominal fee payable, but participants will not be required to join the club and pay annual membership. (The cost will be in place to remove the perspective of ‘No fee = No value.’

4. Opening our facilities to partner organisations

We are a 'community' facility, based quite literally in the heart of our local area and accessible to all. We want everyone to be able to share our home with anyone and everyone. From seniors to mothers and toddlers, those who want light fitness and wellbeing activities to the true endorphin 'junkies' or from next world champion boxers to those who just want to shadow box, all will be welcome. We will facilitate a 10 week project whereby local, informal groups will be offered free access to our facilities on a trial basis. We will endeavour to cover the cost of facilities supervision and utility costs through this appeal.

How you can play your part

We know that everyone is struggling just to pay their bills during the cost-of-living crisis, but we are asking our members, parents, volunteers, coaches, neighbours and local businesses to make a donation to help our appeal.

Even the smallest amount will make a difference...for every £1 that is donated, Sport NI will match that amount. So, our target is to raise £10,000. If we raise £5,000 ourselves, this will be matched by Sport NI up to a maximum of £5,000

There are five simple ways you can help us reach our target, and make this project a reality:

1. Make a pledge. Don’t delay if you’re going to support us because momentum is key to our success!

2. If you are a UK Taxpayer, make sure you click on our Gift Aid pledge. This will allow the club to reclaim an additional 25% of your donation. Once you agree to Gift Aid your donation…That’s it, the club will do the rest.

3. Spread the word. Share our project on your social media pages and tell the world to get behind us! The more people we reach, the more support we will get.

4. Offer rewards. Get involved if you are a local business by donating things we can offer to our supporters. We will give you a shout out!

5. If you want to run your own fundraiser to support us, maybe a sponsored activity or similar, use the 'contact project' button at the top of our page to let us know. Setting up your own page only takes a few minutes, and you won’t need any bank details. Just a fun idea!

This project successfully funded on 18th March 2023