Inside a sprawling gym tucked into the corner of a sprawling strip mall between a Goodwill and a discount shoe store in east Fresno, Sandra Tovar straps on a pair of hot pink hand wraps. Then she climbs through the ropes into the elevated ring and begins throwing punches at an imaginary opponent, her long braid bouncing against her back. With each thrust, she grimaces slightly and pushes air through her teeth. “Ch, ch, ch-ch-ch.” Jab, cross, jab-jab-cross. As she warms up, three tiny giggling girls in workout gear skip past to a beginners’ class on the other side of the room.



A high school sophomore, Sandra is the country’s top-ranked boxer in the junior girls’ 110-pound weight class. She is also the reigning national champion and is preparing to defend her crown in Salt Lake City in early December. The long-term goal, though, is Tokyo 2020, just the third Olympics to include women’s boxing. To qualify, boxers must turn 19 at any point that year. Sandra, born on New Year’s Eve 2001, makes the cutoff by a day.

Even by the standards of elite athletes, Sandra is unusually driven. “All she does is sports, homework, sports, homework,” says her father, Jeff Tovar. “She doesn’t ever ask to go out or anything.” A typical day involves seven hours of school, where she takes mostly honors classes, followed by two hours of varsity cross-country or track practice and then a couple of hours of boxing.

Until recently, Sandra was coached exclusively by her father near their home in Turlock, a Central Valley town of 70,000 between Modesto and Merced, but as her national competition schedule has intensified, she has begun commuting to Fresno twice a week. Although Jeff remains her primary coach, six months ago she signed up with Marcos Padilla, who has trained numerous junior national champions.

That means an additional three hours spent on Highway 99 between the two cities, which is often when her homework gets done. “I look at nationals as a step closer to getting to the Olympics,” Sandra says. “There’s only, like, two or three years left. So I feel like it’s probably going to end up going fast, faster than we think.”

At 5-foot-6, Sandra is one of the tallest competitors in her weight class. In a pair of black leggings and a slim-fit USA Boxing T-shirt, she looks gangly for a champion boxer. When she begins to spar against a boy in her same weight class, she towers over him, quickly pushing him against the ropes and reaching her long arms to land repeated blows on his padded headgear. Coach Padilla shouts, “Numbers, Sandra, numbers!” reminding her to throw more punches to sell the judges on her dominance in a real match. Her father focuses on encouragement: “Come on, mija!”

Sandra is part of a Central Valley boxing tradition that stretches back before California was a state. The valley’s first great champion was Italian American, but in recent decades, most of its great boxers have been Latino. Until a few years ago, women and girls were barred — sometimes by law, sometimes by custom — from formal competition. Jeff Tovar says he doesn’t remember any girls showing up at boxing gyms before 2008 or so.

These days, though, many of the best boxers coming out of the Central Valley are teenage girls. Five girls from the area, all Latina, are among the top eight in their weight classes in the national junior or youth rankings. Another four, all between 9 and 16, finished first or second in the Junior Olympics earlier this year.

When asked why the girls are now excelling, Frank Aleman, the president of the Central California Amateur Boxing Association and the owner of a gym in Fresno, says success begets success: “We have good fighters, in general, and maybe just because we’re good right now, the girls are good, too.” Jeff Tovar says that every young female boxer he’s ever met, including his daughter, got into the sport because one or more of her male relatives were already involved.

When Sandra was 8, she told her dad she was bored in her after-school program and wanted to quit. He offered only one alternative: Come train at the boxing gym. Her mother worked all day as a Head Start teacher, and Jeff trained boxers after his shift as a maintenance worker for the school district. So Sandra agreed to go to the gym, with one condition. “I told him, ‘I am not going to fight,’ ” she says, grinning. “I didn’t want to spar or anything. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to get hit.” Jeff says she cried the first time she took a punch, but he pushed her to keep going because he could tell she had a knack for learning combinations as well as “a beautiful straight hard jab.”

“My dad’s whole side of the family, they all box,” Sandra says, “and we have a gym in our backyard, too, so my dad trained some of his fighters from back in the day, and then they’d watch boxing at the house, too. It was just always part of my life, even before I even wanted to do it, as long as I can remember.”