Boxing Club and Lafayette College Emergency Medical Services, also known as LCEMS, collaborated to host the first “Fight or Flight Night” to teach participants basic boxing form and how to provide basic care for sports injuries.
“I remember just thinking during one of our EMS meetings recently that, ‘Wow, these skills would be super useful in a sports setting,’” said Christina Kouyoumdji ’26, an LCEMS Club member and vice president of Boxing Club.
“The knowledge of how to treat certain injuries, or how to at least provide very basic care in a way to prevent further injury, hopefully, is very useful,” she continued.
Co-President of LCEMS Club Erica Weaver ‘25 encourages members to promote their activities during club meetings and was “really excited” when Kouyoumdji brought up the value of collaborating with Boxing Club.
“Being able to recognize that something is wrong, first of all, and second, to know at least a little bit what to do about it is incredibly important in preventing further injuries,” Kouyoumdji said.
The first hour of the event began with learning the proper form and posture for basic boxing, then switching to pad work, in which one person wears pads for the other person to hit with mock punches to practice their technique.
“I personally had a lot of fun learning about all the boxing because I’d never done it before,” said Paige Griggs ’25, vice president of LCEMS.
In the second half of the event, Griggs and Weaver led the group through commonly used items for EMS situations, such as using a light to test pupil dilations after a hit to the head to identify a concussion.
Weaver said she and Griggs “just had everyone sit in a circle and talk.”
“I thought that went really well, instead of having a formal presentation,” Weaver said.
Next, Boxing Club members explained example scenarios of injuries by falling and injuries to the limbs and head. LCEMS members walked through how they would approach a boxing injury.
According to Boxing Club Captain Jaden Wurm ‘26, this exercise would allow anyone observing an injury to have the tools to identify how best to help.
“It’s really important to be able to convey that information appropriately to care providers once they get on scene,” Weaver said about injury recognition.
Sophi Espina ‘28 cheers at Lafayette but also has experience in football, wrestling and lacrosse. Espina joined LCEMS this year and found the combination of the two useful from an athletic background.
“I learned more about what was in the first aid kit itself,” Espina said.
She added that such information would be valuable if “a teammate or someone I know has an injury like that.”
The event also provided an opportunity to challenge students to branch out.
“I also just thought it would be fun to teach boxing to other people because I know that it can be a bit intimidating,” Kouyoumdji said about her motivation to propose the collaboration. “As a woman, you might not want to join that. That’s part of why I really wanted to branch boxing out to other people.”
Both groups see the potential in collaborating together again, potentially creating a semesterly sports injury prevention and treatment from the perspectives of both athletes and medical personnel. Weaver sees this as an opportunity to get more people involved in LCEMS and Boxing Club without having to join them.
“We have over 130 clubs and you can only be involved in so many, but all of our clubs do different things,” Weaver said. “I had never done any boxing before, so I thought the first hour where we were kind of learning some of the basic punches was honestly really cool.”
“And it’s just also cool to get more people involved in clubs they weren’t considering before,” she continued.
