WEST FARMS, The Bronx (PIX11) — It’s a neighborhood where youth crime is a real concern, but a local family has set up an alternative for young people that’s growing fast.
It’s a fitness program at the family-run boxing gym. Specifically, it’s set up as an after-school opportunity for teens and preteens, which is also designed to help their families stay in shape.
It’s called Each One Teach One, and it runs every weekday at the Kings Boxing Gym, at 900 East Tremont Avenue, one block east of Southern Boulevard.
The entrance, beneath a sharp black and white awning emblazoned with the facility’s name, is somewhat unassuming. A step inside quickly reveals a deep and spacious place. Those words also describe the personalities and minds of the people working out at Kings Boxing Gym after school.
One of them, Alex Morocho, 17, described it as a Zen-like experience.
“I do my workout,” he said, between sparring and punching bag exercises, “and it just eases my mind.”
“It’s like therapy to me,” he added.
The program’s co-founder is bodybuilder José Rodriguez, who’s known locally as “Dominican Hulk.”
“This is what the neighborhood needed,” Rodriguez said about the gym that he founded with a relative, Jose Santiago.
“It’s a bad neighborhood,” he said about West Farms, where the most serious index crimes, including murder and rape, have increased sharply this year, despite a slight reduction of other crimes. “But we’re grabbing the kids that are outside and teaching them,” Rodriguez continued. “That’s where ‘Each One Teach One’ comes in.”
He said that the point of the drills, exercises, and other activities in the program is to help young people focus on positive outcomes.
Jeremy Genao, 15, said that the mission was not lost on any participant.
“You don’t even have to want to be pro,” he said about boxing at Kings gym. “You can just do it for you.”
That’s what Mirella Morales Gonzales, 18, said that she’s doing. Specifically, she said, boxing has helped her achieve a variety of goals in the 10 months since she took it up.
She said that she, like many other people in the program who spoke with PIX11 News, had improved her diet and other personal habits since she started working out seriously. She lost 20 pounds, she said, adding that it’s only the beginning.
“It’s an enhancement for another career of mine,” Morales Gonzales said. “I’m trying to go higher, with the FBI, the CIA — higher like that.”
The average age of athletes in the program is 15. They come daily to the program founded by a Dominican family whose members say it serves families of all kinds.
Families at the gym who spoke with PIX11 News agreed.
“It gives discipline, reinforcement,” said Khamoni Cooper, whose grandson joined the Each One Teach One group this month. “Plus,” she continued, “they also check on them to make sure they’re doing good in school.”
Kings Boxing Gym has two floors. The young people’s program runs from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. daily on the main floor. Upstairs, at 6:30 p.m., mothers who’d dropped off their kids for Each One Teach One have a women-only boot camp class.
Participants from both generations told us that it’s been a welcome alternative.
“[I’m] not just being in the house all day,” said Juan Madrid Cruz, 15. He overcame epilepsy to win most of the many different boxing competitions that the young people at the gym have amassed in recent years. “Keeping my body active,” he said, was the greatest benefit of being involved.
Adonis Ayala is also one of the gym’s biggest competition winners. He had to take a year off for health reasons, but is now back to using the gym’s boxing ring, punching bags, and other pugilist training devices.
Ayala said that Kings Boxing and its youth program are about more than fighting.
“That I can be in the gym and perform like I do is a blessing,” he said.