Sarah Thomas is boxer from Bethpage, New York, fighting out of Academy of Boxing in Huntington, New York. She began her combat career as a kickboxer, with an undefeated record. During her amateur career, she won the Ringmasters (formally Golden Gloves) tournament. Her professional boxing debut was delayed due to COVID-19. As a sports science graduate student who also trains younger boxers, she’s managed to keep busy in the meantime, even as much of her day-to-day has shifted online. Below, she spoke with Just Women’s Sports about how she discovered boxing, the importance of mental health, and what it’s like competing in a male-dominated sport.

What originally led you to boxing as a sport? 

I’ve always been more aggressive in sports. I actually played lacrosse in high school, but I would get kicked out of every game. I didn’t really actually know how to play lacrosse, to be honest, but I was just athletic, so my friends were like, “Yeah, join.” I just got in trouble every single game, because I was just charging directly at people. I was just the worst lacrosse player ever. And then I liked the idea that boxing was an individual sport. In an individual sport like boxing, I couldn’t blame anyone else. I liked that a lot.

I didn’t actually start until I was 20 though, and I’m 30 now. I first competed in kickboxing, but then my coach left. He told me he was in the FBI and that he was getting re-stationed. I didn’t even know he was in the FBI. So after he disappeared, I went to another gym, and I was dabbling with MMA for a little, but I realized I liked the boxing aspect the most out of all of it, so I decided to just stick with boxing. I like kickboxing, but I don’t actually like getting kicked. With boxing, I can focus on one thing, and I like practicing the same thing over and over, which I feel like a lot of people don’t like. I like the idea of, “I’m going to do the same thing a thousand times so I get good at it.”

How did you first realize you had a talent for combat sports? 

I took kickboxing just to try it out and as a workout. I went to the gym, took one class, and was like “All right, I really want to fight.” The coach wouldn’t train me because he had never trained a girl, like all those movies, and then finally he decided he would.

20 seems late. At what age do women usually start their professional careers?

Usually it seems that women start later in life. Really, you can turn professional whenever you feel ready, but the licensing to become a pro varies by state. So you just have to be able to pass the medicals and everything, and then you have to find a promoter who wants you. You have to find someone who likes you, and as a woman, you just have to be marketable. I have noticed that with women’s combat sports, what you look like goes a long way, as sad as that is. It’s like you either have to look good or just be so good that you’re almost some freak.

I wanted to ask you, what is it like being a female in what many would consider to be a male-dominated sport? 

I feel like it was harder in the beginning of all of it, and now there’s a lot more girls than there were before. I feel like every year continuously gets easier and there’s more acceptance. At first, it was really hard for me to find fights. I couldn’t just turn professional without having enough experience. But then the people who were amateur, they were few and far between, and they wouldn’t compete against me. I couldn’t gain experience to get better because I couldn’t really get matched up, so it was hard in the beginning with that.

With boxing, actually, in the ’90s it was really popular for women. That was during the time of Laila Ali. And even before then, it was popular for a little while, and then it fell off. It resurged again recently because it was allowed to be in the 2012 Olympics.

How would you describe the popularity of the sport now?

I think Ronda Rousey, even though she’s MMA, really helped make women’s combat sports more popular. And then also Claressa Shields won the Olympic gold in 2012 when women were allowed in the Olympics, and she won it in 2016. I think she brought the popularity back, and there’s been a few other girls who have made women’s boxing popular again. Now women are actually getting paid. I was actually going to have my professional debut on May 8th, but that didn’t happen because of COVID.

Do you have Olympic aspirations?

I had thought about it at one point, but the weight class I was competing at wasn’t in the Olympics. I sort of just wanted to go pro because I had kickboxed for a while, and when I made the decision to just focus on boxing, I had enough combat sport experience where I wanted to just be a professional rather than spend a lot of time as an amateur. And once you’re professional, you can’t compete in the Olympics.

Can you talk a little bit about how you manage to stay in shape, stay healthy and stay motivated while participating in such a punishing sport?

There used to be times when I would do three-a-days, which is so stupid, but I thought that more was better. I actually train less now, and I feel stronger now than I did, which is weird. I think I was over-trained for a long, long time. So now that I’m older and I train less and eat whatever I want, I actually feel stronger. I actually eat pretty clean, but I don’t count with macros and I don’t count calories or any of that. I honestly just eat whenever I feel like I want to. So if my body is like, “All right, I’m hungry,” I’ll eat. And I don’t do it according to a science or anything, I just try to stay healthy.

I’m sure there’s going to be a point where I feel like I’m getting weaker than I was, and I guess that’s when I’ll know that I’m on the downswing, but I feel like I’m still getting stronger, so for now I’m good. And I notice that with women in fight sports, it seems like a lot of them are older. There’s some girls that are still pros that are in their forties. It’s kind of crazy. I think it’s one of those sports where you can be older as a female.

How important is mental health to you in boxing? 

I’ve had anxiety and OCD since I was really little. The first time I ever noticed that I had OCD, I was eight. It’s a really weird thing to understand. I don’t know how to describe it, but basically it’s like an extreme form of anxiety where you feel like you have to do certain rituals to overcome bad things. Your brain tries to cope with the anxiety through some sort of action, and then you can also have thoughts and the thoughts can keep you up. It’s basically anxiety on steroids, and yeah, I’ve dealt with that since I was little. I always felt from a young age the only time I wouldn’t really notice a symptom of that would be when I was playing sports. So when I played soccer I would never notice that, because I’d be so in the moment that I wouldn’t be able to worry about anything else besides that moment, and boxing’s very much like that. Your head really can’t be anywhere else, because you’re so worried about defending yourself and throwing punches that you’re not thinking about whether you paid your credit card bill or something that gives you anxiety. It’s helped a lot. Honestly, it’s like my version of a drug. If I hadn’t found sports, I don’t really know where I would be. It helps me tremendously in coping with my anxiety. And I’m very open to talk about all of that, because anytime I say, “I have anxiety,” almost everyone that I say it to is like, “Me too.”

I imagine a lot of athletes view sports in a similar way. I have to ask, have you ever had any terrible injuries from boxing?

So in kickboxing, I actually broke my foot, but I didn’t know I broke my foot until after because of the adrenaline. I thought I broke my toe, and then after my fights I saw that my bone was sticking through my skin. I had to have surgery, because that kind of break doesn’t just heal on its own. And then I’ve broken my nose, but it wasn’t from getting hit. A girl accidentally headbutted me. That was not fun. And then besides that, surprisingly, not really.

I’ll have minor things, like maybe my wrist will hurt for a week and I’ll just rest it, or my knees would hurt for a week from running a lot, but then I just rest them. Nothing serious. I’m sure if I got an MRI of my entire body it wouldn’t be pretty though. I have disc issues too. I feel like that is from ten years of combat sports, but I don’t know. Nothing that gives me a lot of pain or anything.

Speaking more generally, how do you recover from a typical fight? 

I stopped doing this, but what I used to do is I would cut too much weight, and then I would compete, and then after the competition I would eat everything in sight and just drink lots of Gatorade and lay in my bed for two days and that was it. I mean, I’ve never really had any crazy recovery, but I actually changed weight classes because one time, two fights ago, I cut too much weight and I had to get IV fluid after, and then that’s when I finally was like, “All right, I’m getting older. My body’s not going to allow me to continuously drop this weight, so I’m just going to move up in weight and feel better and not have to worry about weight cutting anymore.”

Do you have any favorite memories or fights from your career that stand out?

I won Golden Gloves, which was fun. I think that was my favorite. I actually got no sleep the night before, and I had just broken up with this guy I was dating, and it was a really crappy time in my life. But I was just like, “Screw this, I’m winning.” And I won the whole tournament, and did it on no sleep. I felt like it was all in my brain mentally because I wasn’t even able to train the way I wanted to, but I just convinced myself that I was going to win, and it gave me confidence.

Looking ahead, what do you see for yourself in terms of moving forward in your professional career? Do you see yourself competing for a long time?

Honestly, I can’t really pick an end date, but I feel like I would just do it until I felt like my body wasn’t right. If I ever took like a head injury, I would leave too. I’ve never been knocked out or anything, and I think that’s something that would stop me. Because I don’t want to have brain damage.

After an illustrious career for both club and country, Gotham FC and U.S. Women’s National Team defender Kelley O’Hara announced today via Kelley on the Street that she will be retiring from professional soccer at the end of this year, making the 2024 NWSL season her last.

"I have always said I would play under two conditions: that I still love playing soccer, and if my body would let me do it the way I wanted to," O’Hara told Just Women’s Sports in the lead-up to her retirement announcement. "I realized a while back that I was always going to love it, so it was the physical piece that was going to be the deciding factor."

The 35-year-old will retire as a two-time World Cup champion, an Olympic gold medalist, and at least a two-time NWSL champion, depending on where Gotham finishes this season. Her legacy as a player is hard to fully encapsulate, and will forever run through some of the biggest snapshots in USWNT and NWSL history. 

In 2012, O’Hara played every minute of the USWNT’s Olympic gold medal run, after having recently converted into a defender. Her soaring goal off the bench in the 2015 World Cup semifinal is the stuff of legend. And her return from lingering injury to play in every knockout match of the national team’s 2019 World Cup win cemented a storybook international career. 

It was O’Hara who scored the overtime goal in 2021 to earn the Washington Spirit their first-ever NWSL championship, and O’Hara who returned to help see Gotham earn a title in 2023 after years spent in the trenches with the club’s previous iteration, Sky Blue. Her 15-year career spanned two professional women’s soccer leagues in the U.S. (she earned her first professional title in 2010 with WPS’s FC Gold Pride), as well as sweeping changes to the sport both on and off the pitch.

On the field, O’Hara has always been known for a motor that never quits, making the right flank her domain in attacking possession and defensive transition. In recent years, she’s also been celebrated for a competitive fire that raises the level of her teammates, whether she’s in the starting XI or supporting from the bench.

But injuries take a toll, a reality not always seen by the fans watching from home. "I've never taken anything for granted, and I feel like I've never coasted either," O’Hara said of her late-career success in the NWSL despite battling injuries. "I've always been like, 'I gotta put my best foot forward every single day I step on this field' — which is honestly probably half the reason why I'm having to retire now as opposed to getting a couple more years out of it. I've just grinded hard."

Recently, O’Hara has been sidelined at Gotham with ankle and knee injuries, and the situation motivated her to really prioritize listening to her body. "To get injured and come back, and get injured and come back, and just keep doing it, it really takes a toll on you.

"People don't see the doubt that's associated with injury,” she continued. "As athletes we feel a certain way, we perform a certain way, our body feels a certain way, we're very in tune with our bodies. And there's always so much doubt surrounding injury. It’s like, 'Can I feel the way I felt before?' The reality is sometimes you don't."

O’Hara didn’t arrive at the decision to move on from her playing career lightly. But once she began seriously considering making 2024 her final year during the last NWSL offseason, it felt right. "Once I was like, 'Alright, you know what, this will be my last year,' I have had a lot of peace with it," she said. "Truly the only thing I felt was gratitude for everything that my career has been, all the things I've been able to do and the people I've been able to do it with."

She said she’ll miss daily interactions with her teammates and all the amazing memories they’ve created, though she feels lucky to have formed relationships that go beyond sharing a locker room. "You're basically getting to hang out and just shoot the shit with your best friends every day," she reflected. "Which is so unheard of, and I just feel very lucky to do it for so long."

The Stanford graduate also mentioned that the NWSL’s suspension of regular season play in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic made her realize how much playing allowed her the space to simply be creative every day. The tactical elements of soccer provided O’Hara an outlet for problem solving and made use of her naturally competitive edge.

She’s now gearing up to channel her on-field intensity into her post-playing career full time, which is a new chapter she’s excited to begin. "I don't know if the world's ready for it, like the fact that I'm not going to be putting all of my energy into football all the time," she said with a laugh. 

O’Hara said she would like to stay connected to the game in some fashion, whether it be as an owner, coach, or member of a front office. She’s also interested in the growing media space surrounding women’s sports, having provided on-camera analysis for broadcasters like CBS Sports in addition to starting a production company with her fiancée.

"I just feel like I have a lot of passions, and things that excite me," she says. "And I do want to stay as close as I can to the game, because I feel a responsibility — and I'm not sure in what capacity — to continue to grow it."

A sense of responsibility to grow the game has been a consistent refrain for the USWNT and NWSL players of O’Hara’s era, who ushered in a new age of equal pay for the national team and collectively bargained protections for those in the league. The landscape for new players looks different than it did 14 years ago, in large part due to this pivotal generation.

"I feel an immense sense of pride around that, because I don't know if any of us knew that was gonna happen," she said. "We kind of, as things unfolded, took the next step towards changing what women's football looks like in this country and around the world.

"I'm really grateful to have been part of this era with the players that I was [with], not backing down and pushing and knowing that was the right thing to do."

Whatever the future holds, O’Hara is going ahead full throttle. It’s a piece of advice she’d also give to the next generation of professionals looking to make their own impact.

"Whatever you do in life, do it because you love it, and the chips will fall in place," she said. "If you love something, you're willing to do what it takes. You're willing to make the sacrifices, you're willing to handle the roller coaster.

"To me, it's simple. Don't do it for any other reason but that, and I think you'll be alright."

The Phoenix Mercury center spoke with Robin Roberts about her 10-month incarceration, reflecting on her poor living conditions and shaky mental state ahead of her May 7th memoir.

"The mattress had a huge blood stain on it. I had no soap, no toilet paper," Griner told the ABC News anchor in last night’s 20/20 special. "That was the moment where I just felt less than a human." 

She also detailed some of her lowest moments during that time, saying with tears in her eyes that she went so far as to consider taking her own life on more than one occasion. However, the thought of Russian officials not releasing her body back to her family made her reconsider.

"I just didn't think I could get through what I needed to get through," said Griner.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Just Women’s Sports (@justwomenssports)

In February 2022, Griner was arrested and charged with drug possession and smuggling by a Russian court after Sheremetyevo International Airport police found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. The cartridges were prescribed by Griner’s doctor for chronic pain back in Arizona, where medical marijuana is legal. In the interview, the two-time Olympic gold medalist said she had a "mental lapse" while packing, and never intended to bring the cannabis products with her when she returned to play for UMMC Ekaterinburg.

"It's just so easy to have a mental lapse," Griner said. "Granted, my mental lapse was on a more grand scale. But it doesn't take away from how that can happen." 

She was later sentenced to nine years behind bars after her Russian attorneys advised her to plead guilty the following July. Griner was then sent to a remote penal colony where she was forced to spend her days cutting cloth to make military uniforms. From there, it only got worse.

"Honestly, it just had to happen," she said when asked about her decision to cut off her signature long locks. "We had spiders above my bed making nests.

"My dreads started to freeze," she added. "They would just stay wet and cold and I was getting sick. You've gotta do what you've gotta do to survive."

Shortly after Griner’s initial arrest, the U.S. State Department classified her case as wrongfully detained, escalating its urgency within the government and calling even more attention to the situation. On December 8th, she was freed in a prisoner exchange negotiated by the Biden administration.

While she told Roberts she was "thrilled" when she got the news, she was also very upset about having to leave fellow wrongful detainee Paul Whelan behind. She also continues to carry guilt about her arrest, saying "At the end of the day, it's my fault. And I let everybody down."

Griner’s memoir, Coming Home, hits shelves on May 7th.

"Coming Home begins in a land where my roots developed and is the diary of my heartaches and regrets," Griner told ABC News in an exclusive statement. "But, ultimately, the book is also a story of how my family, my faith, and the support of millions who rallied for my rescue helped me endure a nightmare."

Longtime USWNT fixture Carli Lloyd took to Instagram Wednesday morning to announce that she’s pregnant with her first child. 

"Baby Hollins coming in October 2024!" she wrote. The caption framed a collaged image of baby clothes, an ultrasound photo, and syringes indicating what she described as a "rollercoaster" fertility journey.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Just Women’s Sports (@justwomenssports)

In a Women’s Health story published in tandem with Lloyd’s post, the Fox Sports analyst and correspondent opened up about her struggles with infertility and the lengthy IVF treatments she kept hidden from the public eye.

"Soccer taught me how to work hard, persevere, be resilient, and never give up. I would do whatever it took to prepare, and usually when I prepared, I got results," Lloyd told Women’s Health’s Amanda Lucci. "But I found out that I didn’t know much about this world. I was very naive to think that we wouldn’t have any issues getting pregnant. And so it began."

Lloyd went on to discuss her road to pregnancy in great detail, sharing the highs and lows of the process and expressing gratitude for the care and support her family and medical team provided along the way. She rounded out the piece with a nod toward others navigating the same challenges, encouraging people to share their own pregnancy journeys, painful as they may be.

"My story is currently a happy one, but I know there are other women who are facing challenges in their pregnancy journey. I see you and I understand your pain," she said. "My hope is that more and more women will speak up about this topic, because their stories helped me. I also wish for more resources, funding, and education around fertility treatments. There is much to be done, and I hope I can play a role in helping."

The 41-year-old New Jersey native retired from professional soccer in 2021, closing out her decorated career with 316 international appearances, the second-most in USWNT history, in addition to 134 international goals. A legend on the field, Lloyd walked away from the game with two World Cups, two Olympic gold medals, and two FIFA Player of the Year awards.

On Tuesday, FIFPRO announced the launch of Project ACL, a three-year research initiative designed to address a steep uptick in ACL injuries across women's professional football.

Project ACL is a joint venture between FIFPRO, England’s Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), Nike, and Leeds Beckett University. While the central case study will focus on England’s top-flight Women's Super League, the findings will be distributed around the world.

ACL tears are between two- and six-times more likely to occur in women footballers than men, according to The Guardian. And with both domestic and international programming on the rise for the women’s game, we’ve seen some of the sport's biggest names moved to the season-ending injury list with ACL-related knocks.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Just Women’s Sports (@justwomenssports)

Soccer superstars like Vivianne Miedema, Beth Mead, Catarina Macario, Marta, and England captain Leah Williamson have all struggled with their ACLs in recent years, though all have since returned to the field. In January, Chelsea and Australia forward Sam Kerr was herself sidelined with the injury, kicking off a year of similar cases across women’s professional leagues. And just yesterday, the Spirit announced defender Anna Heilferty would miss the rest of the NWSL season with a torn ACL. The news comes less than two weeks after Bay FC captain Alex Loera went down with the same injury. 

Project ACL will closely study players in the WSL, monitoring travel, training, and recovery practices to look for trends that could be used to prevent the injury in the future. Availability of sports science and medical resources within individual clubs will be taken into account throughout the process.

ACL injuries in women's football have long outpaced the same injury in the men's game, but resources for specialized prevention and treatment still lag behind. Investment in achieving a deeper, more specialized understanding of the problem should hopefully alleviate the issue both on and off the field.