Moments later, one of his boxers — 17-year-old Katia Reynolds — came running into his gym at the Westwood Recreation Center with the numbing news.
Fifteen-year-old Ronika Owens-Clemons had been shot in the school playground next to the Leland Avenue rec center. Her 16-year-old boyfriend allegedly had gotten into a confrontation with another boy and pulled out a handgun that accidently went off. The bullet struck Ronika in the side, a wound that proved fatal.
“I was out there when it happened,” Reynolds said. “I’ve never seen anybody shot before. I saw her lying there and I went and got my coach. We watched the paramedics trying to save her and we were there when the police started doing their business. It was just real shocking.”
Carson, the 68-year-old boxing coach at Westwood, has one of the largest stables of amateur girl boxers in a five-state area. Most are about the same age as was Ronika. Some knew her. Some knew the boy who’s now jailed on murder charges for her June 16 death.
As Carson watched his girls’ reactions that night, one thing struck him. While some were shaken, others seemed almost accepting of the situation.
“It affected me more than a lot of the kids,” he said quietly. “To me, it’s such a sad waste of a young person. But some kids look at it as, ‘Well, it was just her time.’ Her time? She was just 15. It’s sad, but kids here are exposed to so much violence, they get hardened.
“So you just try to get them to stay away from crowds like that. You tell them if anyone has a gun, just walk away.
“Don’t fight on the street. If you want to box, come to the gym. You get in here, you learn discipline and self-confidence, and pretty soon you realize you don’t have to show it on the street.”
Boxers bond
The Westwood Boxing Club isn’t housed in a real gym. It’s stuck in a cramped, dingy back room at the old recreation center. It has off-white, pock-marked ceiling tile, a worn blue and white linoleum floor and four heavy bags hang like tired sentries next to a small ring with faded red, white and blue ropes and a canvas that’s taped together.
And yet four evenings a week, the place gets a magical transformation. That’s when Carson and fellow trainer Butch Rodgers open the doors, and at no charge, boxers of all ages — some boys, but mostly girls — come flocking in.
Soon the place is full of chatter, the sounds of girls thudding away on the heavy bags or hitting the padded catch mitts held by Reynolds in the ring. From out in the hallway comes the whir of jump ropes.
Carson said nearly two-thirds of the 30-some kids in his program are girls.
He has stars such as Reynolds, 17-year-old Pepsi Hunter, 14-year-old Kizza McDonald (an Ohio State Fair champ in 2008) and 11-year-old slugger E’Taja Thompson, “our mini-beast” Hunter called her.
The other night there also were two 18-year-old Wright State-bound girls — Stivers High School graduate Alaina Northern and Reynoldsburg’s LaNae Combs — who had just begun training, as had Tierney Daugherty, headed to Sinclair Community College in the fall.
“Some of our girls come from foster homes, a lot are from single-parent families,” Carson said. “But in here they all bond.”
Hunter nodded: “We look at each other as sisters.”
Reynolds explained further: “Boxing’s not for everybody, but it’s a good place to get rid of any anger issues and to get structure in your life. It’s hard work. You learn discipline and you get a sense of pride about yourself. To me it’s a way to become a better person.”
Not just idle words, Carson claims “a lot of the kids that stick in this program get better grades.”
Hunter, a senior at Dayton Early College Academy, is an honor student. Saleanah Burns, an 11-year-old sixth-grader at the Richard Allen School downtown, is a straight-A student.
But the more you hang out around the Westwood ring, the more you find out the best education here didn’t come with the girls.
It was Carson who’s done the most learning.
Tough girls
A former Marine out of Morgantown, Ky. — he was a sergeant of the guard assigned to the Rotunda at President John F. Kennedy’s funeral — he followed the rest of his family to Dayton when he got out of the service and worked at Chrysler and General Dynamics, from which he retired in 2000.
A longtime boxing fan, he said he began helping out local amateur trainer Eddie Ingram: “When Eddie died several years ago, I said, ‘All right I’m closing the gym.’ But the kids begged me to keep it open, and I felt obligated. You tend to love these kids after awhile.”
And he appreciated what they taught him:
“I didn’t want any girls at first. Being an old guy, I didn’t think boxing was a sport for them. But about 12 years ago, Marcella Moncree shows up and she keeps begging me to let her try.
“So I found a little boy for her to fight. She was 7 or 8, and he was 9, and I told him, ‘Don’t hurt her. Just pound on her a little bit so she won’t come back.’
“She ended up knocking him down two or three times. He quit and wouldn’t come back, so I kept her.”
After that, word got out and more girls showed up.
Today, Moncree is a senior at Central State University, and Carson has something of a Ph.D. in girls boxing.
“I really got an awakening,” he said. “I learned girls are easier to train than boys. There’s something about the nature of females. They get in the ring and they want to get it over. Guys feel each other out and posture, but girls just go after each other. And until they’re 12 or so, girls can usually whup any boy their age.”
E’Taja Thompson is proof.
“There’s not a boy here her age who’ll get in the ring with her,” Carson smiled. That made E’Taja, a Trotwood-Madison middle school sixth-grader, giggle.
“I made a boy cry,” she whispered. “Boys always talk a lotta mess. ‘She nothing. I can beat her. ... Yada, yada, yada.’ Then they get in the ring with me and they’re scared. The first good punch, they quit.
“One boy was 13, I think. His buddies said, ‘She good,’ but he didn’t listen. I hit him in the stomach, then in the face. He quit ... and then he cried.”
Yet, as tough as some girls are, they are more squeamish than boys about one issue, Carson said with a laugh: “If I have 10 boys and six uniforms, when one boy finishes I can tell the next one, ‘Put his uniform on so you can box next.’
“The first time I tried that with a girl, she looked at me and said, “I ain’t putting that thing on. It’s nasty.’ ”
The chopping block
The Westwood Recreation Center is set to close its doors July 31. The city of Dayton — faced with budget constraints — is consolidating rec centers for the September opening of the 45,000-square-foot Rec Plex at the site of old Roosevelt High.
But that’s 1.7 miles away from Westwood, too far along tough streets for most neighborhood kids to walk. While the Rec Plex will include a boxing gym, Carson worries what will happen to a lot of his girls.
“Closing Westwood is a terrible deal,” he said. “A lot of the kids won’t have any place to go, and then they will be hanging out on the street. I might have to go buy a van and pick them up every day.”
When pressed, Carson admits he needs more that. His boxing program needs a sponsor to help with the myriad expenses.
“Coach Al is a great coach, a real positive influence,” said 16-year-old Britney Graham, a Meadowdale High School sophomore. “He’ll try to pick you up to get you in the gym. His way of thinking, it keeps kids off the street and out of trouble. I know that for a fact because I used to be in trouble — a lot. But coming to the gym gives you some self-structure. It can change you.”
After the playground shooting, no one understands that more than Katia Reynolds: “If we hadn’t had boxing practice that night, a lot of our girls could have been in the park. It could have been any one of us who got shot.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2156 or tarchdeacon@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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