Jahmal Harvey is blending some new elements with a winning formula alongside his longtime trainer, Darrell Davis.
Harvey will face Daniel Lugo on Friday in his lightweight debut at the Madison Square Garden Theater in New York City.
Harvey, 2-0 (1 KO), is a 2024 U.S. Olympian competing in the featherweight division. As a pro, his first two bouts were at junior lightweight, and now the 23-year-old Harvey is moving up to lightweight, where the team believes he will campaign for an extended period.
“We got 38 rounds in the bank, with all of them being four-minute rounds,” Davis said. “We had 13 different sparring partners.”
Eventually, bigger sparring partners were brought in to test Harvey.
“How else is he going to be able to work on his power?” Davis said. “Instead of people who shy away from him or run from him, the bigger fighters can take his punches better than the 130 and 135lbs fighters.”
The strategy: bring in elite 165lbs amateur boxers to work with Harvey. The decision to bring in amateur boxers over seasoned professionals was deliberate.
“I have already learned a lot about how to run a camp,” Davis said. “It is better to bring in a top amateur to get what we need rather than an ex-world champion, or current world champion, because they might be afraid that he will beat them up, and everyone knows.”
For this camp, Harvey has brought in a wrestling coach. Davis noticed a difference since incorporating that wrinkle.
“A guy like Jahmal, who has seen everything in boxing, bringing something new adds to his motivation,” Davis said. “The strength and agility from wrestling he is taking into his sparring.”
For this fight, Harvey, of Oxon Hill, Maryland, will face Lugo, 6-4 (2 KOs), a 25-year-old from Tucson, Arizona, who is coming off a knockout loss to former MVP fighter Ashton Sylve in November.
Davis – a celebrated USA Boxing coach who has taken Harvey from a novice to the Olympics and now helped turn him pro – says he treated this camp a little differently. The idea: fine-tune what Harvey had already worked on against eager, aggressive sparring partners.
“I told a lot of coaches, ‘I only need you for one round, and I need you throwing a lot of punches, because after this round, I am taking you out,’” Davis said. “It was what we needed out of you, and not so much what you were trying to get out of us.”
Lucas Ketelle is the author of “Inside the Ropes of Boxing,” a guide for young fighters, a writer for BoxingScene and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. Find him on X at @BigDogLukie.
