FOR DAINA MOOREHOUSE, the Junior Cert was less an examination, more an inconvenience.
The young Bray woman has this year passed more grueling tests outside of St Kilian’s Community School than she likely ever will inside its hallowed halls.
While classmates prepared for their first State exam – the be-all and end-all of existence for most 15-year-olds – Moorehouse juggled her studies with a burgeoning boxing career which, in the first seven months of 2017, has seen her conquer her province, her country, and her continent at Junior level.
From Bray’s Boghall Road to Bulgaria, Moorehouse’s year saw her triumph in four major competitions without losing a single round, an extraordinary feat for a fighter of any age, but particularly for one who first laced up the gloves as recently as five years ago. The exam hall in June, then, was baby stuff by comparison.
“The exams were grand! I was expecting the worst but, like, it was easy!”
Moorehouse laughs, aware she’s hanging plenty of her fellow students out to dry, there.
“Well I won’t lie,” she says, “the year was stressful, because you have so much pressure on you with boxing. You have to keep fit, so I’m thinking, ‘Aw, if I miss a day my fitness will go back’.
I trained every morning at six o’clock – I went jogging with my coach, we’d do eight kilometers. Then I’d come back, have a shower and go to school. Then I’d do my after-school study, and then train again that night at seven o’clock – either in the club or I’d go jogging again.
If you face exams this year, there’s your benchmark.
The light-flyweight from the Heatherwood estate again laughs when it’s put to her that, when she walks in to collect her results later this summer, she’ll do so as a reigning European champion.
“The school is so supportive every time I win a competition – they’re always congratulating me. And a girl on my squad who went to the Europeans with me is also in my school. She didn’t win a medal this time but they’ll congratulate the both of us.”
She sheepishly predicts a school assembly of some sorts, and confirms she’ll do Transition Year, a much-needed reprieve before embarking upon the Leaving Cert while on the road to Tokyo 2020.
“I’m over the moon. The year has been amazing, like,” she says. “On the team, they’re such good girls, and we all get along together really well. We all cheer for each other – there’s nothing bad on the team.
“The year has just been amazing; I never thought I’d get to where I am now. Like, going away to all these countries and winning these internationals, being up against the best.”
Fitting, too, that she mentions her team before anything else; despite being a particularly junior member of the 16-strong Junior team which represented Ireland in Sofia – picking up no fewer than two golds, one silver and three bronze medals on their travels – Moorehouse was selected as skipper.
Her opening opponent was the Ukranian champion, Viktoria Fabuliak, who suffered two standing counts en route to a 5-0 whitewash at the paws the Enniskerry Boxing Club southpaw.
Next up, it was pre-tournament favourite Diana Ermakora of Russia in the semi-final. She, too, was rinsed by the Wicklow woman, again on 5-0 unanimous decision, with Moorehouse’s explosive hooks laying waste to the Russian’s gold medal aspirations.
There was no time to reflect, however: the final, versus Britain’s European silver medallist Simran Kaur, took place just 24 hours later. The pair had traded leather on two previous occasions, each registering a victory, with Moorehouse avenging her loss to Kaur back in April.
The showpiece was tense but again ultimately one-sided; Moorehouse’s feints and footwork eventually unlocked Kaur’s defence, and despite a strong finish by the taller Brit, Moorehouse registered her third consecutive 5-0 decision to claim gold for her country.
It was understandably too much for some of those who had traveled to Bulgaria.
“It was amazing,” Moorehouse recalls.
Like, when I first got there, my parents weren’t there – they came like two days later. They were over the moon when I won, they couldn’t stop crying! Even my dad!
“All year long I’ve won all my fights. I haven’t dropped a round.
“I suppose I’m the golden child.”
You could scarcely be blamed for relating Moorehouse’s story to that of another Golden Girl from Bray, but while Katie Taylor’s impact on her chosen craft has paved the way for countless women – both at home and abroad – to pursue their pugilistic dreams, it bore little influence on Moorehouse, as she has little problem clarifying.
“It was actually my brother, Paul. He’s a very good boxer, so he was doing boxing for a long time, a lot of years, and I just decided to join one day. I didn’t expect to keep at it, or whatever, but I began to love the sport, so I just stayed at it for so many years.
I just went for it, and Katie Taylor’s just from my town. I’ve never met her, like, even though she’s from my town. I’ve never talked to her in my life.
When I joined boxing I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I want to be like Katie Taylor’. I didn’t want to be like anyone. I didn’t join boxing thinking, ‘Aw, yes, I’m going to be like her!’ I just joined it, like, and I began to love it. I don’t really have a role model or anything like that. I’m just doing my own thing.
There are times during a conversation with Moorehouse where you can’t help but feel she should be named captain of all 15-year-olds in this country, and more pertinently, others where you forget that she’s 15 at all.
But befitting of her ferocity in the ring, she’s never too many sentences removed from dropping a cold dose of reality.
“Next year I qualify for the Youth Olympics, so it’ll be them next year in Argentina. And from there it’ll be Tokyo 2020. I’ll be 19.”
As for the more distant future, she quite rightly takes some time to give it thought.
“Hmm… Yeah, I’d probably go for another Olympics after that. It’ll probably always be an amateur thing, fighting for medals and all that. Hmm… I could go pro… I don’t know.”
Be it Los Angeles or Paris in 2024, Moorehouse will barely have turned 23, and could conceivably contest a third Olympics in 2028, and perhaps even a fourth in 2032, before turning professional at around the same age as Taylor – if she fancied any of it, that is.
Such is her talent and career trajectory, it’s hardly an outrageous proposition. Moorehouse and her Irish teammates already train under Head Coach Jimmy Payne at the National Stadium every Saturday, and earlier this year were given a taste of the future when they were invited by new High Performance Director Bernard Dunne to Irish boxing’s new headquarters in Abbotstown.
Moorehouse described her day training under the tutelage of Ireland Head Coach Zaur Antia, with Dunne watching on, as an amazing experience, a sentiment echoed by Enniskerry BC Club Secretary Eamonn Carr.
“I thought it was bloody huge that Bernard would give the girls recognition at that age, and have them out there training with Zaur,” Carr says. “Just the fact that the girls know that Bernard is watching them and is aware of them, and he wished them good luck as well, that’s really important, you know?
“The families were all welcome to come out and see Abbotstown as well, which was a brilliant idea.”
Carr jokes that Moorehouse “won’t be the golden girl when she gets back into the gym in a few weeks time,” but as to where that gym will be is a more pressing concern.
“There was an Enniskerry Boxing Club years ago, and Paul O’Toole – Daina’s coach – would have been the head coach there,” Carr explains. “He would have trained in the club himself when he was young. He boxed for Ireland as well.
“The club stopped for a long, long time, but then Paul decided to start it up again. We started off in a community hall in Enniskerry, where we could only get Thursday and Friday nights or whatever was suitable. I think it was actually a playschool during the day, so we couldn’t even leave the ring up or anything like that; we had to construct a ring that folded into the ground, and then we’d fold the bags up and everything like that.
But that wasn’t working for us, so we sub-let a place in Bray – that was last year. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to us, that place was sold, so literally we were like, ‘We’ve got no home.’ There was no club at all at that stage, and that was halfway through the season.
Thankfully for the club which would this year produce a European Junior champion, temporary help was at hand by way of its local massive. Its future, however, remains uncertain.
“The Bray People ran a story that the club was facing closure, then Donal Egan – he owns a place in Bray, the Egan Business Centre – he got in touch and basically offered us a premises, which was brilliant. It kept us open. That lease finished at the end of June just gone,” Carr says.
I’ve been talking to Wicklow County Council since, and they won’t say it publicly but I know they’re looking at Bog Meadow – which is basically a building, football pitches and a ground, that really, for years, nothing has been done with. There’s an Enniskerry Forum – basically a residents group – and they’ve been trying to get the council to upgrade that site for years, for a number of different clubs: a football club, ourselves, a running club, a tennis club. So that’s where our long-term aim would be.
“They told me this week that someone has actually been out looking at the site. But how long that development would take, I don’t know.
“I’ve spoken with TDs this week and they won’t obviously do anything to help with rent, or whatever. They’re not going to do that for one club. But there’s been no contact since Daina won, or anything before that. It’s really difficult trying to get that little bit of support.”
There remains every chance that Daina Moorehouse will frequent Abbotstown in a few years time, but for now she’ll predominantly train in a gym with no permanent address. Given the situation, you can’t help but think of Irish Senior captain Joe Ward’s words on the same issue of gym closures a fortnight ago.
“Where we started was in these gyms, in these small places,” the three-time European champion told The42. “It’s very disappointing, because my own gym where I trained, where I grew up and learned how to box, is starting to come to an end because we have a lack of facilities too.
“It’s so disappointing because there’s bundles of talent all over these towns and cities, and they’re just not getting the opportunities because the County Council or the people involved are just not coming together and giving us the best facilities – or any sort of facilities suitable for a boxing club.
“It’s sad to see these clubs closing down, because Irish boxing is only beginning from now. We’re going to become the number one nation in the world. Just because 2016 didn’t go our way doesn’t mean we’re going to slide down and accept it; we’re going to drive on, and push forward. But we need to start somewhere, and obviously that’s these towns where the boxing clubs are, where we all started as young kids.
“We need to keep as many boxing clubs as we can and give kids the opportunity to go there and learn their trade. Who knows where the kids are that are walking the streets – the kids that could become Olympic champion.”
Daina Moorehouse is about as clear-cut a candidate as one might envisage, but in order for others to rise up alongside her, clubs like Enniskerry BC simply must be supported.
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