AVENAL, Calif. – If you met 21-year-old Shavana Trejo on the street, your first thought would not be “boxer.”
She’s small – about 5 feet 3 inches – and weighs 119 pounds. Her comportment is understated – gentle, even.
But watch her in the ring at the Underdogs Boxing Club in the rural town of Avenal in Kings County and there’s a huge transformation. She punches with a gusto that comes from deep within her. She’s fiery and aggressive.
Her punches have paid off.
Last month, Trejo won the California Golden Gloves State Championship in Pasadena for her weight class, which is 112 to 119 pounds. This week, she’s in Tulsa, Oklahoma, competing in the National Golden Gloves Tournament of Champions. The road to Tulsa hasn’t been easy.
“I’ve been through hell, honestly. I’ve been through a lot of ups and downs in my life,” she said. “Just hitting the bag. It’s like you’re releasing bad, negative energy.”
Trejo said she was a shy, quiet kid, and she was bullied a lot.
“I would come home with black eyes. I would come home with my hair cut, slime thrown in my hair,” she said.
But she never hit back – except in the ring. She started competing at age 13.
She was great at other sports, too. As a high school junior, she was on her way to breaking a school record in basketball when she decided to heed her dad’s advice and focus on just one sport – boxing.
Since then, she’s won 14 belts.
“My dad’s like, ‘look, I believe in you. If I didn’t believe in you, I wouldn’t tell you you’ve got to pick one,’” she said.
She said she’s sacrificed a lot for boxing. Her daily schedule is packed and she bounces around a lot. She lives in the town of Huron and starts every day with early-morning strength training at a gym in nearby Hanford.
During the day, she works a full-time job at a fast food restaurant in Kettleman City. And every evening, she’s at the boxing club in Avenal.
Trejo isn’t the only champion boxer who has worked out in this gym. Former world champion light welterweight and 2012 U.S. Olympic boxer Jose Ramirez trained here years ago, too.
The nonprofit gym hosts a mix of pro boxers, amateurs and kids who just need a safe place to come after school. On any given day, about 20 to 30 kids are at the gym.
So is Trejo’s father, Michael Trejo, who can be heard directing the kids to squat, lunge and jump.
He started out as a volunteer coach at the gym in 2013, not long after Ramirez was in the Olympics.
He said he knew his daughter was going to be a star athlete when she was just a preschooler. He remembers taking her to a track at a middle school in Huron.
“She was wearing a little dress and sandals. I just sat in the bleachers. I said ‘want to try running?’ She said, ‘yeah.’ She ran about a mile and a half without stopping, at four years old,” he said.
Now the older Trejo coaches the younger one. Michael Trejo, 42, said he loved boxing as a teenager in Huron, but when his gym closed, he said he made some really bad choices.
“Drugs, streets. Just everything you’re not supposed to do,” he said.
His first three kids were taken away when he was in his early twenties.
“I had to do something. And I did,” he said.
He got sober and turned his life around, and he got his kids back. Now he teaches them discipline through sports. One of his sons earned a wrestling scholarship to college. Another daughter plays softball. Four of his eight kids have boxed.
And boxing, he said, takes heart.
“In Spanish we call it ganas. The will to push and get it done, it’s very difficult. But like I tell these kids, if you can do this, you can do anything,” he said.
He said he lets his daughter decide how much she is willing to do to become a champion.
“I didn’t want to push her away,” he said. “I love having her in the gym with me. It's a beautiful thing.”
Trejo’s grandmother, Blanca Trejo, agrees.
“I think they make a great team,” she said. “They talk a lot to each other, make decisions together. I mean, the love is there.”
She helped raise her granddaughter. Trejo said her mom isn’t in the picture.
“Well, she was a drug addict,” Trejo said. “My dad was too, but he changed his life for us.”
Her dad, she said, has sacrificed a lot for his kids.
Trejo is also helping to teach her younger brother, Jayden, to box.
Credit: Alice Daniel
“He didn’t go to work sometimes because we had to go to tournaments and we were tight on money. That’s something I wish I can give back to him one day,” she said.
Trejo has her first fight today in the nationals, her most prestigious tournament to date. She hopes one day to become a world champion.
Trejo said family is what inspires her to fight hard. She has a tattoo on her arm that says ‘family’ and another one on her neck of her dad’s birth year, 1983. She also has a tattoo of all of her siblings’ birth dates.
“We’ve been training for so long. Just to have my family involved, it’s something that’s very meaningful to me,” she said.
Her younger siblings said Trejo is like a mother to them. They said they love to watch her box.
“I would say she’s an entertaining fighter,” her younger sister, Mia, said. “I love watching her fight, but it’s definitely nerve-wracking for me.”
