Boxing News – July 25, 2019

42 lBOXING NEWSlJULY 25, 2019 http://www.boxingnewsonline.net

VESTEDINTEREST

Meet the personalities

at the heart of the sport

With JOHN DENNEN

AMATEURS

A FIGHTING CHANCE

RECOGNISED:

The Empire club’s

charity project gets

a visit from Royal

couple Prince Harry

and Meghan Markle

do. “The amateur boxing club’s been

there since the late 1960s. My father

[Chris Sanigar] boxed for them and

obviously we’ve gone on to have a great

track record creating champions. We’ve

always been in a deprived community,

so the club’s always had a social

conscience. But I’d say it was 12 years

ago that Martin Bisp,

who runs the amateur

club, and myself started

to do more formal work

with young people in

the community and

started to develop it. The

charity’s been around

for the past five, six years

now. Since we became a

registered charity, we’ve

just gone from strength

to strength,” Sanigar

explained. “We work

with around 4,000 young

people a year at the moment and it’s

wide-ranging, it’s young people that are

at risk of exclusion from school but not

only the ones with behavioural issues,

we’re also dealing with passive learning,

young people with mental health issues.

All the way through to those involved

with anti-social behaviour, gangs,

criminality. Obviously a lot of work is

around knife crime at the moment, so

it’s a vast spectrum of work that we’re

doing with young people.”

The way they’re using boxing to

help treat mental health is particularly

fascinating. “We were recognising that

certain young people

were being labelled as

a problem with their

behaviour, etc. To be

honest it didn’t take a

doctor to realise that

what they were suffering

was a mental issue,”

Sanigar said. “This was

five, six, seven years ago

where mental health

wasn’t readily talked

about.”

It was difficult

though to get support

services for those who weren’t facing

an emergency, even if they were on

their way to a crisis. “You start to realise

the threshold as well that a young

person has to go through,” Jamie said.

“Just impossible for a young person

with maybe a lack of parental support,

chaotic home life, they’re not going to

be able to achieve those thresholds.

You realise the system’s broke and those

young people maybe with low level

anxiety, depression, all the way through

to self-harming etc. weren’t getting the

support they needed. Naïvely we just

decided to use the sport of boxing and

develop our programme that way. We

introduced therapy. In the early days it

was the traditional model of sending

them to a therapist. That had good

results but there was a better way of

doing things that involved me getting

therapists into the gym, teaching them

how to coach boxing, at a very low level

I must say. It allowed them then to do

the therapy within the gym session.

We’ve also got sports psychologists

involved developing our programme.

“We’ve embedded psychology

within the delivery so all our coaches

are mentors but they’ve also got that

psychological training to develop and

implant the messages into young people

that are needed, maybe around mood,

behaviour. It gives a lot more of an

impact to the work we’re doing and it’s

taking it to that next level really.”

OR years the Empire

Fighting Chance

charity has been

doing significant

work in Bristol. Their

programme now

also incorporates an

important element

to help address

mental health. These

efforts have even

been recognised

with a royal visit

from Prince Harry

and Meghan Markle.

“I understand

that our charity

was on their

radar. Harry’s got

a vested interest himself in sport and

mental health. He’d heard about our

work,” Jamie Sanigar told Boxing News.

“He understood it. He got it. He was

very passionate and followed on with

subsequent meetings with his people

and other projects that he’s setting up.

It’s great profile for the sport to get royal

interest. It’s certainly benefited us.”

The mental health support they

provide is one strand to the work they

An important

programme

is running at

the Empire

amateur

boxing club

in Bristol

F

‘A LOT OF

WORK IS

AROUND KNIFE

CRIME AT

THE MOMENT,

IT’S A VAST

SPECTRUM’

John

Dennen

@BoxingNewsJD

Amateur Editor

Photo: KANE RICH/EMPIRE FIGHTING CHANCE