'What we do in here is a lot more than boxing': At Chuters Youth Boxing club, kids get free lessons in the sport, life

LITTLE CHUTE – Inside a cramped, dimly lit rectangular garage just off Main Street — about 20 steps behind Anyone Rides Little Chute — is where Nick Maher’s worlds collide.

By day, Maher — who owns the auto repair shop with friend Riley Charette — is turning wrenches to get vehicles back on the road. By night, he’s giving aspiring young boxers the tools they need to survive and thrive in one of the oldest forms of hand-to-hand combat.

The garage, which used to house hot rods, is now home to punching bags, a boxing ring and Chuters Youth Boxing club.

“When I ended up buying this building in Little Chute and opening this second shop, I didn’t even know I was going to make this a boxing club,” the 29-year-old Maher said. “And one day I walked out of the overhead door and I looked at the back garage and I turned around and said, ‘That’s my boxing club.’”

Clearing out the old garage and transforming it into a boxing club allowed Maher to fulfill two dreams — coaching young boxers and keeping costs down so kids who were interested in trying the sport could do so for free.

“I love cars as much as I love these boxers,” Maher said. “Those are very much hand-in-hand passions. So this is the best of both worlds. I get to work on cars all day and I get to take that money and put it right back into these kids and these boxers. And to me, that’s probably the best part about all of this.”

Boxing is a family thing for Maher

Boxing has been a part of Maher’s life since he was young.

His grandpa boxed in the Navy and his father also fought as an amateur.

“He had 41 fights. He won 40 of them. He lost his last fight. He never boxed again,” Maher said with a smile.

Maher and his older brothers, Jim and Joe, got their start in boxing when the family moved to central Wisconsin. A chance meeting at a gas station with someone wearing a hat emblazoned with the name of a local boxing group led to them becoming part of the Wisconsin Rapids Boxing Club, led by legendary coach Ken Hilgers.

Maher was invited to train alongside his older brothers even though he was 7 years old and too young to compete in Wisconsin.

“So my coaches would run me all over when I turned 8 to the other states where you could compete,” he said.

Maher went on to have a decorated amateur career, winning multiple state championships, fighting internationally and finishing with about 150 amateur bouts on his record.

He left the sport for a few years in his early 20s but reconnected with Hilgers and became an assistant coach for him.

“I had such a great time with it. I really fell in love with the sport all over again, just like I did at 8 years old. I just had this whole passion for it again,” Maher said.

He decided to move to Appleton during the COVID-19 pandemic because he wanted to open a repair shop in a more populated area. He still drove to Wisconsin Rapids for a while to help Hilgers in the gym, and later tried his hand at becoming a boxing referee and a judge for fights.

“But it didn’t satisfy my itch,” he said.

Chuters Youth Boxing is born

Maher knew he wanted to open his own club and knew he wanted it to be free for the kids and their families. In return, he asks only that the kids show commitment, dedication and respect.

“I can’t tell you how many people told me I would never be able to run a boxing club and do it for free. And that was the only way I would do it because to me, that’s what this sport is about,” he said. “We’re not trainers. We’re coaches. And coaches don’t get paid, trainers do.

“We do it because we want to keep this sport alive. We want to keep the heart beating within amateur boxing. And the way to do that is to expose kids to it.”

Chuters, a USA Sanctioned Boxing Club, officially opened July 16 with its first practice.

“I wasn’t even all that prepared and I didn’t know if I was going to have any boxers. I really didn’t,” Maher said. “I remember building that equipment and saying to myself, ‘Man, are you crazy?’ You might never get a kid in here.”

Two kids showed up on that first night. They told friends about the club and word of mouth spread and before long a steady stream of young boxers was coming in and out of the garage, which is open Monday through Thursday nights from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Sylas De Leon, a 16-year-old who goes to high school at Appleton East, has been doing karate and other combat sports since he was young but has found a home at Chuters.

“It’s like a family almost. I really like it here,” he said. “It means a lot to me. I’ve been here four nights a week every week for the past few months, and it’s my second home now.”

De Leon appreciates what Maher has done by giving kids the chance to try boxing free of charge.

“He’s been like a second father figure to most of these kids,” De Leon said. “He’s a big support that a lot of kids don’t have at their house and he definitely helps a lot of times. He’s there for everybody when they need him to be.”

Alex Martinez, 16, is a student at Appleton North. He’s been boxing for over a year but said he didn’t start taking it seriously until he got to Chuters.

“When I first got here, nobody talked to each other and now everybody just talks and laughs. It’s really fun,” he said. “It means a lot because there’s a lot of kids out there that pay a lot of money to go to gyms, work out, but my coach here is doing it all for free. He pays everything for us. It’s really good.”

Chuters boxers having early success

From that first practice, when two boys showed up, Maher has seen a steady flow of boxers come in and out of the garage.

He has about 15 boxers who are “really serious about this” and on any given night there are 25-30 kids at the club working out or giving it a try for the first time.

One of the boxers to show up on that first day in July was Weslin Ariel, who won a state championship in Neillsville last month and is scheduled to compete this weekend at a regional competition in Hinckley, Minnesota.

Chuters took seven boxers to the state tournament, almost unheard of for a boxing club in its infancy. In addition to Ariel, Carmelo Jefferson and Tripp Ahrens also won state titles.

Maher said coaches at the state tournament chided him for trying to coach so many boxers in a sport where most clubs handpick four or five top prospects and give them special attention.

He’s also heard from those who think his goal of making the club free for kids is not sustainable, but he remains undeterred.

“A lot of coaches believe you can’t train the masses and I don’t believe that,” Maher said. “I don’t believe it’s all about the coach. I believe we need to give them the environment, we need to give them the equipment, and we just need to teach them the basics. And from there the kids that are going to be boxers will be boxers.”

Maher got a little emotional on a recent night when the club was packed with boxers taking their turn in the ring for spirited sparring sessions.

“That was the most competitive sparring I’ve ever been around in this gym or my last gym,” he said. “Even the little guys, they all went for it. That tells me that flame is growing. And that’s kind of how I look at these kids. It’s kind of like starting a fire. They come in, they’re smoldering, you kind of feed it and then once the fire gets going, I don’t have to watch it anymore.”

Martinez appreciates what the boxing club has given him already and has big dreams about what the sport can do for him in the future.

“I want to break the cycle of my family,” he said. “All of them have like an ordinary job and I want to one day be older and be a professional and be able to take care of my family and my friends. I’m not really doing this for me. I’m doing it for my family and friends.”

What’s next for the club?

Maher hopes to have 12 to 15 boxers from Chuters on boxing cards over the next two months, including shows in Marshfield and Milwaukee later this month and then a pair of shows in Chicago.

Chuters also plans to host its own boxing card at The 513 in downtown Appleton on April 6, when Maher hopes to have 15 boxers from the club competing.

Maher is also training for his own return to the ring and first professional fight Feb. 24 at Oneida Casino in Green Bay. The pro bout will be another entry on his boxing résumé, but more importantly he wants the kids in his club to see that anything is possible for them — in and out of the ring.

“I want to train champions, but it’s not all about that,” Maher said. “What we do in here is a lot more than boxing. These kids are learning life lessons that’s going to follow them into their career, into their relationships, into their friendships, fatherhood, motherhood, whatever it is. It’s going to follow them. What they learn in this gym is much more than boxing and I believe that in my heart because it did it for me, in my career, in my friendships, in my relationships.

“If I never train a national champion or I never train an Olympic champion, my goal on paper might never be met, but as long as these kids go out into the world and I get to see them when they’re in their 20s and 30s and 40s and I get to see their kids and their grandkids and maybe even get to train them, to me that would be a bigger victory than ever seeing one of them win a gold medal.”

If the club continues to grow, Maher knows there might be a time when they outgrow the garage behind the repair shop.

And for as much as he loves working on cars, he can envision a time when he hires another mechanic for the shop so he can focus on coaching boxers full time.

The only thing he knows for sure is that 50 years from now, he still wants to be coaching boxers and giving back to the sport the way Hilgers did for him.

“I really believe I’ll still be doing this when I’m an 80-year-old man. I mean, that’s my goal,” he said. “That is overwhelmingly my goal. That’s what I want the most. I want to be able to still work with these kids. I really want to be able to teach this sport to every generation coming up. And I think that’s every boxing coach’s goal, is to keep this thing alive.

“You don’t keep it alive through the adults. You keep it alive through the kids. You’re feeding the sport into this community. We’re injecting boxing right back into the Valley and that, to me, is the coolest thing.”

This article originally appeared on Appleton Post-Crescent: Chuters Youth Boxing club provides kids free lessons in boxing, life