In the D.C. region, conversations often start with, “What do you do?” WTOP’s new series “Working Capital” profiles the people doing the work that makes the region so unique.
Boxing can be a lonely sport, not just for the athletes isolated in the ring, but also for the coaches.
In Prince George’s County, Maryland, the competition is fierce. The area is home to several gyms and has produced some of boxing’s biggest names — former World Boxing Council featherweight titleholder Gary Russell and current World Boxing Association Super Featherweight Champion Lamont Roach Jr., not to mention the legendary Sugar Ray Leonard.
“It’s like a ‘pay-your-dues’ sport,” Oxon Hill Boxing head coach Darrell Davis said. “Nobody’s going to let you come in their gym and do anything. So whatever you do in boxing, you just got to start your own thing and you got to let it grow from there.”
Davis was a football coach when he started Oxon Hill Boxing in 2011 in a space at the Oxon Hill Staff Development Center, just outside the bottom of the Capital Beltway near National Harbor. It was a way to keep kids on his team active during the offseason. But he didn’t have much more than the athletes themselves. They didn’t even have a ring.
“We started with one punching bag and a pair of hand pads, and just two mirrors on the side. Our first gym was no bigger than this,” he said, as he sat in the lobby area of his current gym, where fighters go through before entering the locker room and the gym itself.
An eye for talent
It was in that initial space at the Oxon Hill Staff Development Center where Davis would work with one of his first fighters, Jahmal Harvey, who would later become a national champion and represent the U.S. in the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
Harvey started playing football at a young age and met Davis through the Oxon Hill Boys and Girls Club. Davis instantly recognized Harvey’s talent.
“Jahmal was that good at football, he could be playing in the NFL with good coaching. He was that good, he was like my little protégé,” Davis said.
But Davis decided to take a step back from coaching to take care of his growing family of seven children, and others took over coaching Harvey in football.
That’s when he noticed that Harvey was not getting the attention his talent deserved.
“When I saw him with the other coaches, and they weren’t really doing what I needed them to be doing for them, out of anger, I started coaching him in boxing,” Davis said.
Harvey’s smaller stature put him at a greater disadvantage in football, and just before high school was the perfect time to transition to boxing.
Pushing the right buttons with budding athletes such as Harvey is part of what’s made Davis such a successful coach.
“It’s a gift. … I just see something that you do that I can be like, ‘Oh, I can work with that. I’m going to make you real good right there,'” Davis said. “I see talent. A lot of coaches, they see a kid, they walk in, they end up being nothing. But you give them to me, about six months from now, they’ll be something.”
It was clear early on that Harvey was, indeed, something. At just 18, he won gold at the 2021 Elite World Championships. Three years later, he was competing in the Olympics.
Davis has been there since day one, and his success as a coach has only grown.
He’s brought in dozens more fighters and grown his coaching staff. USA Boxing recognized Oxon Hill as “Gym of the Year” in 2019 and 2021, a period of time during which Davis said he was bringing as many as 20 kids from his gym to national tournaments.
He said he does it not just to improve his boxing club but to fulfill the lives of kids in his community.
Harvey agreed Davis doesn’t just have an eye for talent, but knows how to nurture it.
“If boxing’s not good for you, he’ll tell you, ‘I can see you really, it seems like your body type, I could see you succeeding in baseball.’ He’s got a lot of great connects and he’ll always help you figure out what you need,” Harvey said. “He’s never going pressure you or build too much pressure on making you do something you don’t want to do.”
As a father, Davis said looking out for kids’ best interest comes naturally.
‘I was that kid’
Davis grew up about 12 miles north of Oxon Hill in Landover, Maryland, and playing sports helped keep him out of trouble.
“This is part of my life or how I am, how I grew up. I grew up with a rough background, but I had caring parents, caring family, but you had to be alert of your surroundings where I’m from. And I knew my right from wrong at the age of five,” he said.
But he said he works with some kids who don’t have people looking out for them, like he had growing up.
“Not knowing is a lot of these kids’ issue. I knew what a good person was. Even me, growing up, I had people that took me under their wing, showing me how to fish and hunt and different atmospheres and cultures,” Davis said.
That exposure to different lifestyles is something he tries to give his own kids, and with seven of them, that may seem like a tall task. But he said he doesn’t stop there.
“If I take my son fishing, I’ll just take the whole gym. And I try to separate my family with the boxing, but it’s just not about me,” Davis said. “If I can take my kids somewhere, but if I knew I could have helped three other kids that don’t have nobody, that bothers me, because I was that kid.”
On top of his day job as a tow truck operator for AAA Mid-Atlantic, it makes for an extremely busy schedule.
A typical day for him involves dropping his kids off at school, going to work and getting off around 3 p.m. to be with his children after school — and that’s before any of the boxing begins.
Then, he heads to the gym to work with professional boxer Jarrett Hurd, for whom Davis is the third coach. Hurd is a former unified light middleweight world champion, and has held the WBF, IBF and IBO titles.
If Harvey is training for a coming fight, Davis will work with him earlier in the day as well, as his primary coach.
Then, in the evening, the kids arrive at the gym.
“I try to split it up, like a Monday, Wednesday, Thursday — have my Tuesdays free,” Davis said. “And then we might have fights on Saturday, a fight on Saturday with a couple kids, and then I’ll run to my son’s basketball game, run to my daughter, whatever they got going on and just call it a day. That’s basically my life.”
From self-reliance to building community
Davis said he couldn’t handle it all without his staff of seven coaches. Their help and support, he said, allows him to be there for his daughter’s cheerleading competitions or gives him the time to take out his wife on a Friday night.
Lemor Geddie has been working with Davis and Oxon Hill Boxing for about seven years as a strength and conditioning and boxing coach.
Davis saw something in Geddie and described him as “the missing piece” he needed to elevate Oxon Hill.
“He’s the best strength and conditioning coach in this country,” Davis said. “That’s like my right hand guy and I wouldn’t be right now where I’m at if he wasn’t a part of me.”
Geddie came to Oxon Hill from another gym in the area and knows just how much boxing talent there is in the D.C. region.
“In this area alone, you have numerous gyms and it’s like a highlight for the city. The city is known for great fighters. There’s so many fighters that came from this area, dating back to Keith Holmes, Chop Chop, Derrell Coley, Jemal Hinton. There’s so many great fighters, of course Sugar Ray Leonard, within the DMV area — William Joppy, Sharmba Mitchell, the list goes on.”
He said Oxon Hill’s strong sense of camaraderie stands out from other gyms.
“We try to make it a community, a family community, somewhere safe where the kids can come to and avoid the negativity out in the streets,” Geddie said. “Not only is it about boxing with Oxon Hill, it’s about making the kids know and understand that there is someone that cares, someone that loves them, someone that’s willing to take time out and show them a different way.”
Davis said his background in football has played a part in building that atmosphere in his gym.
“Camaraderie, brotherhood, team — a lot of boxing doesn’t have that,” he said.
Harvey said he’s grateful for that, and he said he knows that one day, when his boxing career is over, he’ll be coaching one day, too.
“It’s just like a family here. Everybody learns from each other, pushes each other, because boxing can be a lonely sport, so it’s great that we got this community right here,” Harvey said. “That’s why I think this community, this family that we built, has made it so far.”
But, unlike Davis, Harvey won’t have to start his coaching career from a tiny, makeshift gym at the Oxon Hill Staff Development Center.
Davis’ current facility now includes around 10 punching bags of different varieties, two different sized boxing rings, a weightlifting area and a host of other workout equipment. It even has a basketball hoop, a reflection of Davis’ love for and connection to different sports.
“Like I said, we started with one punching bag, now I’m giving bags away,” Davis said.
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