Helping Our Youth Excel Boxing Academy

Rico Hoye a resident of Phoenix, and a former Professional Boxer. Boxing & Youth Center was created to address the growing need to promote the physical, mental, spiritual, and academic well-being of African American, Caucasian, Latino, and Asian youth in the community, many of whom face disproportionate risks and challenges. In response to an immediate and urgent need to create both an organization and a program that will assist and advise troubled youths. In particular, using training in the sport of boxing and individualized education programs, such as reading, health education, and life skills classes H.O.Y.E. Boxing & Youth Center addresses multi-dimensional and deleterious factors destroying the future for a growing number of African American and Latino teenagers. These challenges and urban ills include drug abuse, violence, proliferation of gang activity, family dissolution, illiteracy, crime, and isolation and hopelessness, among myriad of others. Boxing & Youth Center has been about more than simply throwing jabs and body punches, or putting on gloves and hitting a speed bag. Its focus on education, not just in the classroom, but on life skills training, is what sets the Center apart as an invaluable community resource and a proven gang intervention and prevention initiative. The goal is to impact Phoenix youth to resolve differences with boxing gloves, rather than violence or bullets. Boxing is a young person’s sport. As such it is ideally suited for the task of dealing with problem youngsters. A sport of conflict, it calls for demanding exercise routines, alertness under pressure, and tremendous stress while performing, aggressive behavior when required and excellent health. Achieved through boxing it is these very accomplishments, once acquired, that turn problem youngsters into well-behaved, confident, reliable young people. Exposed to the training routines in the H.O.Y.E. Boxing & Youth Center program, children and teenagers will find that life’s problems become easier to solve, confidence increase, higher goals and standards suddenly evolve and dealing with the threat of persistent conflict in their home environment becomes manageable.