Skipping ropes hitting mats. Boxing gloves smashing against punch bags. Sweat dripping from headguards.
These are just some of the things you can see at one of the UK’s first boxing academies run by a further education college.
Sheffield College is pioneering a scheme which sees aspiring young fighters put through a sports scholarship programme that is part classroom education, part training in the ring.
It is part of their Elite Sports Employer Skills Academy programme which gives students aged 16-19 – and from across Yorkshire and Lincolnshire – the opportunity to undertake workshops with local sports clubs while studying for their A-Levels or BTEC qualifications.
For the boxing academy, which has been running two years, students are in college from 9am to 4pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while the rest of the week is spent at Titans Boxing Gym – run by former professional fighter, John Fewkes.
He himself won 22 fights in the super welterweight division during a successful career and, today, recalls how the sport completely changed his life after he joined his first gym aged just 11.
From being a quiet, shy and nervous kid, it turned him into a more confident and social young man, he says.
Now, he is determined to pass on his wealth of knowledge and experience in the sport to the youth at Titans Boxing Gym.
Louis Axcell, curriculum team leader for sport and sport science at Sheffield College, believes that half of the learners in the gym would not be in college if it wasn’t for boxing.
“It’s a huge benefit to them because their attendance, punctuality and academic results have all been improving,” he says.
There are currently 14 teenagers on the programme, with Axcell hoping for that number to increase to around 20 in the next academic year.
Riley Maughan, 18, is the oldest learner at the gym and already on the path to success: he won the Yorkshire Youth Development Championships and a 71kg Yorkshire Youth Belt with a broken hand.
He says that he found going to college every day frustrating so having the gym days in between has helped him persevere with education while simultaneously following his dream of sporting glory.
Destiny Palmer is another student at the academy. She says the welcoming environment at the gym has been a major factor in her enjoying the programme. At just 16, she has already won an East Midlands Junior Belt and the 2024 England Boxing National Development Championships.
“This course has taught me a lot of discipline,” she says. “Waking up early, putting in the work at training for long hours and it’s tough.”
Marcus Dutheridge, also 16, says boxing has kept him on the straight and narrow after issues in education previously. “I box for discipline,” he says. “It helps me get off the streets because I was always getting kicked out of school, but boxing brought me in here. Now, when I’m in college, I know that I have to do my best because it is connected to the boxing.”
He adds: “If I don’t do well in college, I can’t come to the gym, so it motivates me to do better.”
Without this boxing academy, Dutheridge may have been part of the shocking statistic that a third of 18-year-olds are not in education or training in the UK.
Yet boxing has brought him here; motivated him to engage with formal qualifications; got him working for a brighter future.
Sheffield College has pioneered this scheme, then, but it begs the question: in 2025, should schools and colleges be putting a higher emphasis on sport as a way to inspire more students to academic success?
