Stablemates Isley and Davis Lead the Parade of Boxers into the Olympic Trials

America’s premier amateur boxing event starts on Dec. 9. The host city is Lake Charles, Louisiana. The event, a six-day affair, is climaxed by the finals of the Olympic Team trials.

Sixty-four male boxers in eight weight divisions will be competing to keep their Olympic dreams alive. The top two in each division will advance to a box-off at the Olympic training facility in Colorado Springs.

There are fewer boxers competing this year than in 2015 when the Olympic trials for men were held in Reno. That’s because there are two fewer weight classes. The light flyweight (108 pounds) and light welterweight (141 pounds) classes have been expunged, reducing the number of Olympic weight classes for men from 10 to eight. (There are now five weight classes for women, up from three in previous years.)

The sixty-four boxers represent 26 states and the District of Columbia. Defying the odds, two of the favorites are products of the same gym. The Alexandria Boxing Club in Alexandria, Virginia, spawned Troy Isley and Keyshawn Davis. Best friends born five months apart, both are expected to be #1 seeds in their respective brackets.

Troy Isley

Isley, 21, took up boxing at the age of nine. His family then resided five blocks from the gym which sits in a rec center in a gentrifying neighborhood in North Alexandria that is historically an African-American district.

Isley first came to the fore in 2012 when he won a National Police Athletic League title, defeating Devin Haney on the road to the finals. In 2017, he scored a split decision over Uzbekistan’s super-talented Ismail Madrimov at a tournament in Hamburg, Germany. This year, he avenged a previous defeat to Cuba’s Arlen Lopez, narrowly out-pointing the 2016 Olympic gold medalist at a tournament in Nicaragua.

Isley competes at middleweight (165 pounds), a deep division despite some recent defections. Money Powell IV abandoned the amateur ranks in January of 2017, signing with Richard Schaefer’s Ringstar Sports. In July of last year, Team USA lost the services of Nikita “White Chocolate” Abibay who was poached away by Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom organization. As an amateur, Abibay split two fights with Troy Isley.

Keyshawn Davis

Davis, 20, hails from Norfolk, VA, the same hometown as the late, great Pernell “Sweet Pea” Whitaker, a 1984 Olympic gold medalist. Like his buddy Troy Isley, he started boxing at the age of nine and went on to become a two-time National Police Athletic League champion.

A lightweight, Davis is a clear-cut #1 seed after winning silver in the 2019 Pan American Games in Lima, Peru, and in the 2019 World Championships in Ekaterinburg, Russia. In both tournaments, he came up a tad short in the finals against Cuba’s gifted Andy Cruz.

Kay Koroma, the Common Thread

The patriarch of the Alexandria Boxing Club is Dennis Porter who has been there for more than 20 years. He’s a plumber by trade, as is second-in-command (but more hands-on) Kay Koroma who has quietly risen up the U.S. amateur boxing ranks to where he now spends more time in Colorado Springs than back home in Virginia. An assistant coach with the 2016 U.S. Olympic boxing team, Korona, 39, will serve in the same capacity in 2020 when the scene shifts to Tokyo.

Koroma, whose legal first name is Kompa, had a brief pro career, winning five of six documented fights. Three of those bouts were in Virginia; the others in Zambia, Kenya, and China.

Shakur Stevenson’s back story as a boxer began in Newark where he took up boxing at age five under the watchful eye of his grandfather Wali Moses. But it was Koroma who polished Stevenson into an Olympian. Stevenson won silver in Rio, one of only two U.S. male boxers to medal (light flyweight Nico Hernandez won bronze).

Korona has continued to work with Stevenson who was brilliant in his last outing, snatching the vacant WBO world featherweight title. He also continues to work with Mikaela Mayer who was eliminated by eventual gold medal winner Estelle Mossely in Rio, subsequently signing with Top Rank, under whose banner she is 12-0 as a pro.

Koroma is as comfortable working with the women as with the men. He has worked extensively with Virginia Fuchs, the LSU grad who is America’s most established female amateur boxer, and with Maine lightweight Amelia Moore who took up residence in Alexandria to speed up her development. At last glance, Moore was ranked third in her weight class.

Will Koroma continue to work primarily with amateurs after Tokyo, or will he follow the example of several previous U.S. Olympic boxing coaches and go pro full-time? Time will tell, but he was recently hired as a consultant by fledgling New Jersey promoter Vito Mielnicki Sr whose precocious 17-year-old son, a welterweight, is a blue-chip prospect in the PBC stable.

“Kay is going to be the next top trainer in the business,” says Mielnicki.

At the amateur level, Koroma is already there. He is on pace to become recognized as one of the greatest American amateur boxing coaches ever!

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