LUBBOCK —  The morning before his fight, as he waited in line for his 6 a.m. weigh-in, slurped an Orangesicle protein shake in a strip mall and later watched his younger sister practice her punch combinations with their father, Jayden Hernandez reminded himself what he knew about boxing. 

The day’s bout — a third-round matchup in the 2025 USA Boxing National Championships that would pit him against the top seed in his bracket —  would have to be won with discipline and specificity, not a tit-for-tat brawl, he repeated to himself and to his father that December morning. The 15-year-old from Kyle, who stands 5-foot-6 and weighs 105 pounds, would have to be perfect. 

“One good hit, and this guy can knock you,” his father and coach, Fabian Hernandez, told him. Jayden, his face solemn beneath wispy brown hair, nodded. 

Boxing no longer produces American heroes nor commands national attention like it did half a century ago. But like practitioners of other faiths, the Hernandezes aren’t especially interested in America’s waning devotion. They remain committed to the sport’s grueling sacraments in hope of its rewards. It’s why Fabian Hernandez first took his son to a ring almost a decade ago. It’s why his son, who is by nature calm, and already hardened by several second-place finishes at national tournaments, has kept dealing and taking blows. 

American boxing’s future runs through Texas, which has the largest number of youth fighters in the country. One in five lives in the Lone Star State, according to the country’s governing body for amateurs, USA Boxing. Within Texas, the Austin area has emerged as one of its most fertile grounds for talent in recent years, producing six youth and adult national champions and surpassing, at least for now, historical powerhouses like San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley. 

Largely sustaining this culture are the boxing gyms of Austin’s periphery, clustered in southern and northern suburbs increasingly home to the region’s nonwhite population and working- and middle-class families. 

Boxing in the United States survives in large part because of the continued attention and participation of American Latinos. Today, they’re three times as likely as white Americans to identify as boxing fans and, according to USA Boxing operations manager Mike Campbell, account for more than half of all youth boxers. In Austin-area gyms, that reality is even starker: Latinos make up nearly all youth participants. 

Night after night, in the stuccoed garages or warehouse office parks of Buda, Kyle, Pflugerville and Round Rock, the smack rhythm of fists hitting weighted bags and the skirts of nylon shoes dancing across the ring hum a soft music. Youths like Jayden furrow their brows, purse their lips and briefly clap their gloves during sparring breaks, eyes fixed on their opponents.

In a sport known — or rejected — because of its physical cost and blunt objective, there is little space for error. Commitment becomes nearly total.  

Jayden doesn’t remember playing alongside the gym during his father’s amateur boxing comeback attempt in the early 2010s. But he does remember playing with his father’s trophies, around the time Fabian Hernandez first took him to boxing lessons at age 7. After taking a year off to try soccer and baseball, Jayden returned to boxing five years ago — this time training in his family’s garage under his father’s direct tutelage. 

Those father-and-son sessions quickly grew to include Fabian Hernandez’s best friend’s son, Osiris Rangel, 12, then the boys’ younger sisters, and eventually dozens of other kids. Early this year, Fabian Hernandez moved the operation, which he named Let Em Fly Boxing Academy, into a warehouse. Participation has continued to grow. 

So, too, has the gym’s reputation, built on Jayden’s high placements at national tournaments and national title wins by Osiris and three female youth boxers — including the boys’ sisters Lily Hernandez, 11, and Emoni Rangel, 10. 

Training is tough and ramps up in the weeks before a national tournament. There are distance runs and sprints, long circuits of sit-ups, tire throws, box jumps, ladders and bag work, followed by sparring several nights a week with kids whose parents drive them in from Killeen, San Antonio, Uvalde or Laredo. During peak periods, some train six days a week.

“At no time can you take a break from this sport. It’s a livelihood,” Fabian Hernandez is known to tell his athletes. 

Hernandez has his children write out where they want to be in five and 10 years. The most common answer among kids in his competitive team: They want to be champions. They want to go pro. 

“I don’t just want to be good, or great,” Jayden said during one training session. “I don’t just want to go pro and be a stepping stone for someone else. I want to be a world champion. I want to be known.”

Manuel Sepeda was 13 when he gave boxing a second chance in 1985. A troublemaker raised by his mom and aunt, he began to make the five-block daily walk from East Austin’s Santa Rita Courts public housing project to the Pan-American Recreation Center to train. Sepeda went in search of discipline and purpose: boxing’s mythic whisper. Other East Austin Chicanos, from the projects and nearby homes, went too. The gambit paid off for some, including Sepeda, who later carved out a modest professional career in his 20s. 

Twenty-five years ago, when Zach Martinez started coaching youths, that grit still defined the sport’s storyline. Many of the kids who showed up at Pan-Am or Montopolis recreation centers were often getting into trouble. Some were shot dead on days off from the gym. Poverty — the harsh backdrop boxing has long claimed — was ever-present. 

Today, though that storyline is still told, it is less common in Austin, said Martinez, who currently trains youth boxers out of the Montopolis recreation center.

That doesn’t mean boxing has stopped being a blue-collar sport. Far from it. But, “there are a lot more fathers in corners,” said Sepeda, now 53, who served time in federal prison before becoming a car salesman and boxing trainer. “That’s a good thing.” 

Fabian Hernandez, who grew up boxing while his own father sat behind bars, agrees. Boxing is a trade he is teaching his son. Being in his corner matters. 

The father in the corner has become more important in part because of the rising cost of participation. Spending has increased in youth sports, especially since the turn of the century, as private facilities and travel-based circuits have become increasingly prevalent, said Jon Solomon, community impact director of the Aspen Institute’s Sports and Society Program. (Montopolis and Pan-Am recreation centers now have much smaller programs than the private gyms in Austin suburbs.) 

But boxing carries additional burdens: Limited participation by age and weight class makes national tournaments essential, and the sport lacks an offseason, pressing parents to travel out of state — and pay for it — several times a year.

Campbell, the USA Boxing operations manager, estimates the average fighter or family spent about $1,200 to participate in December’s national championships in Lubbock, covering transportation, lodging, food and registration. Hernandez estimates that he spent about $2,000 this year to take his two kids to tournaments in Lubbock, Las Vegas and Tulsa this year, but only because his gym’s aggressive fundraising covered roughly three times that amount. 

Of course, the father in the corner is much more than a wallet. He wraps wrists, waves mitts and makes weight decisions. He raises his voice for the judges to hear, or to admonish after a loss. He lowers his voice to comfort. 

As Jayden skipped around the ring dressed in blue, his opponent edging toward him, the first round of his third-round matchup appeared to go to plan. The opponent, broader-shouldered and aggressive, rushed in. Jayden pivoted out. Some punches landed; others missed. Jayden countered with quick strikes to the head. 

Fabian Hernandez swayed at ringside. When the counters landed, he smiled, proudly. “Beautiful,” he told his son between rounds. 

But the pace proved hard to sustain. In the second and third rounds, the opponent worked Jayden onto the ropes and kept him there. Jayden’s pivots slowed, and the fight became a brawl — blow traded for blow — as Jayden tried to escape one corner and then another, tripping at times and taking repeated punches to the face. 

After the unanimous decision against him, Jayden walked away from the rings toward a covered corner of the auditorium, out of view of the mezzanine stands filled with fans. He stared at the wall, turning from his father, who listed frustrations about his son’s drop in form. After a few minutes, he stopped. 

“You’ve proven you’re among the best,” he told Jayden. 

From the crowded stands of the Lubbock Civic Center, four rings come into view below. In a tangle of red and blue, fleeting contests are decided in 90-, 120- or 180-second rounds. Talent collides with chance, bravery with apprehension, expectation with delusion — meanings that settle only later, when the adrenaline has faded.

Boxing may be the most delicate of games because of the unavoidable risk of grave injury. It is also delicate because triumph and defeat are decided by judges who can each see only a partial angle of the fight from their bench. In Lubbock, any loss ended a boxer’s tournament, leaving fighters with days’ worth of empty hotel reservations. The thin line between excellence and obscurity became unmistakable.

The fragility is visible, until it isn’t. An older Chicano man, gaunt and bald, with a cryptic neck tattoo peeking from a black hoodie, shrieks when a referee issues an “eight count,” an eight-second stoppage intended to protect a fighter’s brain.

“That’s bullshit. He hit him with a jab,” the man yells, as he swallows bright yellow popcorn and the kids around him giggle. “He didn’t even fall. Got to let them fight.”

Safety remains a roundabout conversation in youth boxing. USA Boxing enforces medical screenings and morning health checks designed to prevent fighters from entering the ring with existing head injuries — a proven way to reduce the risk of seizures or strokes, said ringside physician Leah Geodecke, a volunteer at nationals. But among coaches and fighters, risks are often framed as inevitable — concerns to be reckoned with only if they arrive. At the end of the day, Hernandez said, “It’s a combat sport.” 

And though the rewards of the adherent come from sticking with the sport, boxing is hard to remain in. At the end of the road for many, Sepeda reflected, comes the day “you can’t get past a kid no matter what you do.” 

“I don’t think people [who box] are quitters,” Sepeda said. “But boxing is a sacrificial sport, and it’s a very lonely sport.” 

Walking into the lobby after his loss, a red rash glowing on his right cheek, Jayden accepted hugs from his sister, teammates and fathers. He said he would replay his mistakes that night in bed, as he felt the soreness of his arms, legs and face. He would think about them over the next few days while sparring with other fighters who had been surprised with early exits, and over the coming weeks back at the gym in Kyle. 

Those details, or at least that feeling, will be there “forever,” he said. “It’ll be there when you want to quit.”