Lisa Kuronya Coombs is tall and thin, a graceful blonde with light blue-green eyes that sparkle like a crystal chandelier. You might think she’s a fashion model.
You’d be wrong. Kuronya Coombs is a boxer.
And she’s a regional, national and international women’s boxing champion.
Fighting from 2001-2009, she racked up three national Golden Gloves titles, two USA Boxing national championships, one world championship and two international bronze belts. She boxed in 53 sanctioned fights with only five losses. She captained the USA Boxing women’s team for two years, traveling to India, Ecuador and Argentina. She fought for equal treatment for women’s boxing. She’s in the Maine Sports Hall of Fame. And if she hadn’t officially “aged out” at 36, under the rules of that time, she could have competed in trials for the first appearance of women’s boxing in the Olympics.
“I had no intention of getting in the ring,” she says. In the beginning, her only goal was to work out. But she got so good at boxing that she began competing, winning her first 10 regional fights, half with technical knockouts.
No longer a contender, the 50-year-old Kuronya Coombs, of Harpswell Neck, now trains women and men in intense, one-on-one hourly sessions at The Boxing Studio. The gym is in a converted garage, part of a house she and her husband own on Augusta Road in Topsham.
The studio has punching bags in different sizes, from a small “cobra” bag to a large “heavy” bag, but there is no boxing ring. Kuronya Coombs says her studio is for fitness, not for competitive fighting.
Her championship belts line the walls and her trophies crowd multiple corners. Newspaper clippings and photos are taped to the walls. “I didn’t want them up there,” she says, but her husband told her they were her resume.
On a recent spring day, 51-year-old Tammy Champagne, a registered nurse from Durham, wraps her hands in cotton to protect them and dons red, white and black Ringside boxing gloves.
Kuronya Coombs wears “focus mitts” used to teach pugilists. She drapes a body protector around her neck that looks like an oversized life preserver.
Workout music blares in the background and a wall timer counts down the seconds. Kuronya Coombs quickly, without yelling, announces sequences of numbers from her own nine-point punching system. Champagne follows the numbers, landing her punches at Kuronya Coombs: 7,7 — jab to the head, jab to the head — though there’s no actual head-punching here. Then 1, 3, 5 — left hook to the head, left upper cut, left hook to the body.
For an hour straight, Champagne punches, moves into jumping jacks, squats or other calisthenics, then jabs and punches again and again. The punches move at machine-gun speed. Thump, thump, thump. No letup. Pound, pound, pound. Faster, faster. No stopping. Footwork like a dance. Punch, punch, punch.
“It’s the hardest workout on the planet,” says Champagne, who has been working with Kuronya Coombs for five years.
Alexis Mann, 42, of Bath, is in the next training session. Why boxing? “I like the idea that boxing is about strength and intelligence and uses the mind and body,” Mann says.
Mann follows a similar workout, her face turning red from exertion, allergies and humidity that’s filtering through the open doors. Is she tired at the end of an hour? “I feel great,” she says, smiling.
These women won’t compete in a ring, says Kuronya Coombs, but if they’re ever in a situation where they need boxing skills, they can use them.
Kuronya Coombs grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She was 5 feet, 11 inches tall by the time she was in ninth grade. She was teased, called a “giraffe.”
After earning a degree in environmental science from West Chester University, also in Pennsylvania, Kuronya Coombs worked long hours at a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers field office on the contaminated Housationic River near Pittsfield, Massachusetts.
Running and biking weren’t enough, so she went to a kickboxing studio next door to the office. She was sparring with her instructor one time when he accidentally kicked her in the face, breaking her nose so badly that it had to be surgically put back in place. She was determined to learn how to defend herself.
Kuronya Coombs visited friends in Maine, bought her first pair of hiking boots and never left. She got a job at Ransom Consulting in Portland and discovered the Portland Boxing Club.
The first time she walked in, she was overwhelmed by the smell of sweat and the sound of loud rap music. The boxers were nearly all men. She remembers the moment as intimidating, but not enough to turn around.
Only one woman, Liz Leddy, trained at the club and competed. “She was tough,” says Kuronya Coombs, and they’re still friends.
Women’s boxing “wasn’t much of a thing back then,” she says. “I kept showing up, kept training.” She says a coach at the club, Skip Neales, figured, “We’re not going to get rid of this girl.” So Neales, who died May 18, taught Kuronya Coombs the fundamentals of boxing. Bob Russo was her head coach and traveled with her to national competitions.
Kuronya Coombs began fighting through USA Boxing New England, the governing body for amateur boxing in the region. The next step was national competition through Golden Gloves and USA Boxing. If a boxer is good enough, she then can compete internationally.
Kuronya Coombs benefited from her height-to-weight ratio and her long reach. Still, boxing is 60% mental and 40% physical, she says.
“It’s only you in there. It’s not a team sport,” she says, thinking back on her mindset in the ring. “There was a lot of pressure on me. I didn’t want to disappoint my coach. You have to know you’re going to be hit back, in the face, and could be injured. I didn’t want to be injured. I didn’t want to have a broken nose again.”
“The whole time you have to figure out (your opponent’s) boxing style. Some are scrappy, like they’re fighting for their life. There’s a burst of energy by that kind of boxer for the first 30 seconds. They’re going to tire themselves out. I’d wait for that window and boom, boom, boom,” she says, punching the air.
She built her stamina through relentless training. Five times a week, she ran 3-5 miles. She would do calisthenics before work. After work, she would go to the club, where she would hit the heavy bag and spar for two hours or more.
At competitions, the inequities between men and women’s boxing got under Kuronya Coombs’ skin. Men competing at the national level were paid to travel and to eat, train and stay at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Women athletes were not.
“I was blatantly discriminated against,” Kuronya Coombs says. “I stayed in a motel and I was having to find healthy places to eat. I really felt like a second-class citizen.”
In 2006, Kuronya Coombs and the Portland Boxing Club sued USA Boxing on the grounds that amateur women boxers, like men, should receive transportation, food and lodging when they attend national fights.
Kuronya Coombs was worried the lawsuit could ruin her boxing career. But she won that fight, too. The lawsuit was settled out of court in 2007 and women were given the same opportunities as men for any USA Boxing bout. Rule changes for Golden Gloves soon followed.
Kuronya Coombs later joined a national group called Let Them Box, advocating for women to compete in the Olympics. In 2012, the International Olympic Committee agreed to admit three classes of women’s boxing — flyweight, lightweight and middleweight.
Kuronya Coombs always fought as a welterweight. “They would have locked me out even if I hadn’t aged out,” she says.
Today, Kuronya Coombs lives on Harpswell Neck with her husband, Bob, a builder, and their 12-year-old daughter, Acadia, who sells eggs from a roadside stand. Her career has provided opportunities for countless women. She changed lives — and continues to, in a quieter way, today.
“This is corny, but she changed my life, physically and mentally,” says Champagne, one of the students at Kuronya Coombs’ studio. Her trainer is humble, she says, but she is “a great advocate for women.”
