A Big Youth Boxing Event Is Coming to East Oakland

On Saturday afternoon, Aug. 8, more than 40 young fighters will meet a boxing ring in East Oakland’s San Antonio Park, taking turns throwing jabs and ducking hooks as they participate in the inaugural Fights & Function Fundraiser.

Each fight is scheduled to go three rounds and will count toward the competitors’ official amateur boxing record; the winner of each bout will receive a replica World Boxing Association belt.

“The OG, old-school coach in me believes that you don’t get belts until a tournament or a world title as a pro,” says Dalia “La Pantera” Gomez (also known as Coach G), founder of Vertical Skillz Outreach, the organization behind the event.

“But the fact is,” she tells me during a recent call, “kids love belts, you know?”

And that’s the motivation behind this weekend’s event, as well as Coach G’s daily boxing training programs: making sure her fighters, specifically the younger ones, are happy.

“We’re just trying to make these kids feel regal,” Coach G says, “because that’s what they are —warriors, kings and queens of this earth, let alone Oakland.”

The title belts, adorned with the names of local sponsors and decorated with imitation gem stones, are also a bit of a tribute to Coach G’s family roots.

The belt’s “rubies” are an homage to her late grandmother. “She loved the color red, specifically red roses,” she says. With her grandmother’s love for flowers in mind, Coach G reflects on what Vertical Skillz Outreach has created at the park. “Here we are,” she says, pulling from Tupac’s classic poem about defying the odds, “trying to be that rose that grows through concrete.”

Coach G has pulled weeds from the park’s cracked pavement and twisted her ankle on the uneven grounds; it’s all a part of the sweat equity that has gone into the park since 2020. Back then, she says, “Nobody said anything when I was doing it on the on the playground, that’s because there was a gigantic homeless encampment on the playground.”

She worked with occupants of the encampment, and got folks to make room for her to hang punching bags from the jungle gym. But once the space was cleared Coach G realized more kids were playing on the structure. “I felt like I was in the way,” she reflects, “because I’m hanging the bags on the monkey bars and all of the kids would monkey around it.”

Realizing “more kids in the park is always great,” she moved her boxing training program to the tennis courts. But with that expansion, and the later construction of a full boxing ring, came more eyes. Coach G met with former council member Nikki Fortunada Bass, who was transparent: she couldn’t give Coach G official permission to use the park, but they wouldn’t stop her either.

“Oakland had so many things going on, they just had to kind of turn a blind eye,” Coach G explains.

With a background in childhood development and a job as an OUSD teacher, Coach G’s résumé eased the process. “They didn’t feel that it was a threat,” she says, “especially because none of my kids would get any trouble.”

Originally from Oxnard (which, because of the amount of fighters who’ve come from there, is also referred to as “Boxnard“), Coach G was a college hooper before finding her way to the ring. A Golden Gloves Champion in 2015, she turned pro in 2017 and fought her last bout in 2019 — a fundraising venture in Tijuana.

Before offering classes at San Antonio Park, Coach G would train fighters by Lake Merritt. While her main focus is using boxing as a tool to holistically mentor younger kids from the community, she’s also worked with titans like famed Black Panther Party leader Elaine Brown.

Coach G says that Brown once told her, “You know, Pantera, ain’t nobody down to fight no more.” People weren’t willing to fight for a righteous cause, Coach G remembers Brown saying, “Everybody’s afraid to lose what they got.”

That pushed Coach G to consider how deeply people have been indoctrinated to think about themselves only. Boxing, like the revolutionary work of the Black Panther Party and the Brown Berets, isn’t about concentrated power. “Technique comes way before power,” Coach G professes, “you don’t ever lead with power.”

Instead, she says, a successful fighter and a impactful community activist should live by the same equation: “technique plus speed equals power.”

So this Saturday at San Antonio Park, the site of the historic Chicano Moratorium protest and the longstanding Malcolm X Jazz Festival, her technique for creating change is to do it big for the community.

In addition to two dozen boxing matches there’ll be water balloons and a dunk tank, free breakfast served in the morning and old-school cars pulling up all afternoon. Marketing Kings’ Tyranny Allen will be the ringside announcer, and musicians including Stunnaman02 and Ian Kelly are set to walk boxers out to the ring. “I just want to do everything I can,” says Coach G.

“The soil is very rich,” she says, referring to the Town as a whole and going back to the analogy of a rose growing through concrete. “I don’t care what type of flower, weed, plant or fruit, it takes its time to grow — and we’re constantly fighting through that.”

The Fights & Function Fundraiser takes place Saturday, Aug. 8, 12:30–6 p.m. at San Antonio Park (1701 E 19th St., Oakland). For tickets and information, click here.