Faith Wins Gold at the 2026 Bronze Gloves

What Is the Bronze Gloves Boxing Tournament?

The Bronze Gloves tournament is one of the events on the British Columbia amateur boxing calendar intended to give developing fighters meaningful competition against athletes with comparable experience.

For the 2026 event, Boxing BC divided Bronze Gloves competitors into 0–5 bout and 5–9 bout experience brackets, while athletes with 10 or more bouts competed in the Provincial Championship portion of the weekend.

That experience-based structure matters.

In amateur boxing, especially with young fighters, development is not only about winning. It is about getting the right rounds, facing the right level of opposition, learning how to manage nerves, and finding out what actually holds up once the bell rings.

And boxing asks a lot from an athlete.

ESPN’s well-known Degree of Difficulty analysis ranked boxing first among the 60 sports it evaluated, based on demands including endurance, strength, power, speed, durability, nerve, hand-eye coordination and analytical ability.

Watching 15-year-old kids voluntarily dedicate themselves to something this difficult is still crazy to me.



And inspiring.

Two 15-Year-Old Boxers, Two Completely Different Challenges

I have coached and cornered plenty of fighters over the years, but this tournament was different for me personally.

These were the youngest athletes I had ever coached and cornered in competition.

Both had only recently turned 15.

Before them, the youngest boxer I had coached at this level was Gerald, who was already 16 when I began working with him in 2022.

What impresses me most about Faith and Agustin isn’t simply that they compete.

It’s how coachable they are.

These two are constantly among the first athletes to arrive at the gym. If I have a little free time before training, they somehow find me and try to squeeze in extra one-on-one work. And when practice is over, they are usually among the last ones trying to get one more correction, one more round, one more piece of information.

Faith takes it even further.

She carries a notebook where she writes down details from her training: mistakes she made, technical corrections, things she wants to improve, things we worked on, and things she wants to remember.

At 15 years old.



That tells me more about where an athlete can go than talent ever could.

Faith’s Challenge: First, We Needed an Opponent

For most of the lead-up to Bronze Gloves, we weren’t even sure Faith would get to compete.

She was the only boxer registered in her age and 46 kg weight division.

That is unfortunately a reality in some smaller divisions of female amateur boxing. The competitive pool can be so small that the same athletes often become each other’s sparring partners and eventually meet each other in actual competition.

That is exactly what happened here.

We are incredibly grateful to our friends from the Revolution MMA Boxing team, my good friend Coach Jamie Allison, and his athlete Averi for entering the bracket and giving both girls the opportunity to compete.

Averi is not some mystery opponent we had never seen before.

She is one of Faith’s regular sparring partners.

The two had even participated in a developmental exhibition bout against each other only two weeks earlier.

You might think that would make Faith more comfortable.

It did the opposite.

When Your Opponent Knows You Just as Well as You Know Them

Faith was nervous.

Really nervous.

She knew exactly how capable Averi was because she had felt it firsthand in sparring.

And I knew exactly what we were dealing with on the coaching side because I have a ton of respect for Jamie’s knowledge and experience.

There were no secrets here.

We knew them.

They knew us.

They knew Faith’s tendencies. We knew Averi’s tendencies. Both corners had already seen the matchup play out repeatedly in training.

That made this about as close to a genuine 50–50 fight as you can get.

So we had to find the small details.

That is where boxing gets fun.

During their developmental bout two weeks earlier, we learned that being passive was not going to work. Averi is good at recognizing when somebody starts fading and turning up the pressure.

So this time, Faith had to be capable of pushing the pace for all three rounds.

Not one.

Not two.

Three.

And she did exactly that.

As the fight progressed, Faith began putting her combinations together more confidently. She mixed her levels, attacked the head and body, and started letting the 1-2-3 flow instead of waiting.

By the second half of the fight, she was piling combinations together.

Then in the third round, she landed a big right hand that forced the referee to administer an eight-count.

All the extra rounds.

All the notes.

All the questions.

All those moments where she showed up early trying to steal extra coaching time.

They showed up when it mattered.

Faith Becomes a 2026 Bronze Gloves Champion

When the referee raised her hand, Faith had done it.

Gold medal. Bronze Gloves champion.

There are wins where you feel relief.

There are wins where you feel excitement.

This one made me proud because I knew how nervous she had been before stepping into the ring.

Being brave does not mean you weren’t scared.

Sometimes being brave means you were scared as hell and walked forward anyway.

That is what I saw from her.

And for Super Sweet Science Boxing, this was an especially meaningful milestone: our first female athlete to win a boxing tournament gold medal.