NORTHAMPTON — For almost two years, Vanessa Chakour taught boxing classes in a tiny room at the Greenfield YMCA. Although they met just a few times a week, the small group formed a community of women who bonded through the sport.
As she began teaching the classes in the summer of 2024, Chakour was finishing work on her second book, “Earthly Bodies,” and teaching online writing courses, spending significant time behind her laptop screen.
Chakour saw an opportunity to expand the community she built at the YMCA and integrate her other passions. While Holyoke and Springfield already had several boxing clubs, she noticed Northampton didn’t appear to have any.
“ We needed to progress. We needed to take it to another level,” Chakour said. “I realized I was enjoying that more than everything else I was doing because everything else was online. I was just getting so tired of being online. I wanted to be in person with people.”
That desire became Hex Boxing Club, a women-centered gym in Northampton that opened to new members in June. Chakour, a former New York fighter who trained at Brooklyn’s Gleason’s Gym, built it around a holistic approach that pairs boxing with meditation and herbalism, and around a belief that women need a space where they can train at a high level without being objectified or underestimated.
Two months after opening, she became the only woman in New England to hold USA Boxing’s Gold-level Coaching Certification, its highest.
Chakour converted the space, originally used for offices, into her new home base. Boxing is the focus, but her other interests are woven into the gym’s DNA, giving it a calm feel.
The boxing ring shares a wall with the meditation room. Another room serves as a quiet space, featuring a pair of organically made bean bags. Locally sourced fruit sits in the kitchen as well as a TerraCycle bin for plastic. The giant windows give the plants and the people natural light that was nonexistent in the YMCA space.
As a remnant from her career, a fight card promoting one of Chakour’s fights in 2003 hangs in the hallway to the kitchen.
The club reflects Chakour’s holistic approach to boxing, a sport often reduced to what is seen in movies.
“Boxing is the focal point,” Chakour said. “I teach Western boxing as a holistic martial art. In Eastern tradition, especially in Daoism, there’s this understanding that you’re part of the ecosystem. Sometimes in Western boxing that’s compartmentalized. I don’t approach it that way here. As athletes, our health and well-being are inseparable from the health and well-being of nature.”
Chakour created the Hex Boxing Club as a private membership association. To join, prospective members may be invited by current members or fill out an application online. To build a space where every member can feel safe, the club allows only women and nonbinary people who feel aligned with a women-centered space.
At the center of the approval process is trust. Chakour wants newcomers to feel aligned and show mutual respect across the community. Before receiving a key fob for access outside class, new members must complete 16 boxing sessions. This ensures members form proper boxing techniques to use the equipment safely.
To create a community that goes beyond boxing, Chakour hosts events outside class, such as leading a monthly herbalism class, teaching the group how to make fire cider, hosting brunch, or holding a watch party for Irish boxer and three-time undisputed champion Katie Taylor’s final fight in September.
“There’s a little bit of something for everybody here,” said member Caitlyn McCarthy of South Hadley.
The boxing club doubles as a study space for McCarthy. As a nursing student at Greenfield Community College who spends her evenings working at a fine-dining restaurant, she often trains in the mornings before going to class.
”You want to be there and to train,” McCarthy said. “It just feels like a great place to be, whether it’s 6 in the morning or we’ve been here at night for events, and it’s a really pleasant space.”
McCarthy became interested in boxing after her boyfriend showed her the trilogy fight between Taylor and Amanda Serrano. After a chance encounter with Chakour’s partner, she decided to give the club a shot.
Walking in with no experience, it was a welcome surprise when the class began with guided meditation and stretching. After some warm-ups, Chakour led and participated alongside the class in drills.
“ I remember leaving that first class feeling like I was on cloud nine,” McCarthy said. “It’s a great workout physically. It’s a fantastic mental exercise for yourself and a great way to practice being grounded.”
A long road to gold
Chakour’s own training didn’t stop when the gym opened. She earned her Gold-level certification in August after an invitation to USA Boxing’s Olympic training headquarters in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It is the highest level of coaching certification offered, requiring candidates to receive multiple certifications before applying and then receiving the invite.
During her week at the center, Chakour worked with coaches including Billy Walsh, who coached Ireland’s team when Taylor won Olympic gold in 2012, and Nikki Burleson, the first full-time female national boxing coach in Team USA history. To pass, coaches must earn an average score of 85 or higher on their assessments.
”It was an intense week. It’s like all-on full-time. They ran through drills with us,” Chakour said. “We had lots of seminars, about safety in the ring, medical, nutrition, all that kind of stuff. And then we also worked with the high-performance athletes.”
Though the qualifiers for the Olympic team have not happened yet, many of the men and women Chakour worked with are likely to appear for Team USA in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
The certification served not only as validation for the way she taught her students, but also as a proud recognition of her dedication to the sport after going through the ups and downs as a boxer in New York.
After graduating from the University of Massachusetts, Chakour moved from Amherst to New York City in 1996. She worked as a personal trainer when she met a professional boxer who sparked her interest. Chakour then committed herself to the sport, waking up early to make the 4:30 a.m. train. She threw her first punch when a fighter who wanted to work on their defense needed a sparring partner. That moment in the ring piqued her curiosity even further.
“I was able to unleash this part of me I never met before,” Chakour said. “And what people find here, when you’re in the boxing ring, you connect with your animal nature, fight, flight, freeze response, all of that. I was really curious to explore it even further.”
She started training and fighting at Gleason’s in 2000. It was there she met her future trainer and mentor Bobby Miles. His ability to break down technique is something Chakour emulates in her own coaching.
But for as much as she dedicated herself to the sport, women’s boxing was still in its infancy, leaving Chakour often without someone to fight.
“ It was really hard to get fights. I won a lot of fights on what they call byes or walkovers, and that means that your opponent either doesn’t show up, or they pull out, or they don’t even have an opponent for you. So I had a lot of disappointments in being prepared for many, many fights that never happened,” Chakour said.
Chakour credited an hour of daily meditation with helping her deal with the letdowns of training for no-show fights.
“My ego started to get out of it a little bit. The way I sort of came to terms with it is, I didn’t get into boxing to win a title in the first place,” Chakour said. “I got into boxing because of the self-development, how I grew as a person, and that’s eventually what I came back to. I’ve gained so much wisdom from this sport. I’ve grown as a human being. Resilience, confidence, all of these life skills I wouldn’t have had otherwise had I not trained at the highest level.”
Chakour returned to western Massachusetts at the onset of the pandemic while she worked on her first book, “Awakening Artemis.” After more than 20 years in the Big Apple, it was time to live somewhere with trees instead of skyscrapers.
“My nervous system was done with the city,” Chakour said. “It felt overstimulated. I wanted to be closer to nature.”
Between the encyclopedic knowledge of the finer points of the sport and a commitment to a holistic approach to teaching, Chakour’s students walk away from classes learning so much more than how to throw a hook.
“ You can tell she’s very skilled,” Florence resident Libbey Wade said. “ Not just punching, but, strategy, footwork, like the whole realm of boxing she really knows what she’s talking about. I think there’s a comfort in that.”
Chakour’s approach is repaid with trust from her students. Northampton’s Reema Hatoum arrived at Hex with no boxing experience, but after watching Chakour shadow box, Hatoum’s instant reaction was, “I want to learn how to do that.”
“ You want to learn from her. She gives off this aura of positivity,” Hatoum said. ”She can see what your limits are, she doesn’t try to force you to push through. She gives you your time to figure it out, which is, I feel, great in a coach.”
Nothing gets overlooked in the process of teaching boxing. Chakour makes sure that every student is comfortable regardless of skill level and their goals, whether they are just looking for a workout or training for the Golden Gloves.
In a sport with no ceiling, according to Chakour, much of her joy is seeing the evolution of her students in their skills and confidence. Not only does she want to strengthen her bond with her roughly 20 current students, but also to spread her roots out to bring new members in.
“ I hope to train more fighters. I think I want to continue progressing as is, because it’s such a great community,” Chakour said. “Everyone’s so supportive of each other. They’re progressing really well together. I want to grow the base and continue this close-knit, tight-knit culture that we have here.”
