Sport / ‘Impulsive’ Inkster punches above her weight in boxing success
AN “IMPULSIVE” teenager has won her first boxing bout after spontaneously signing up during freshers’ week.
Nursing student Inga Inkster defied nerves and just weeks of training to beat a fellow student from Stirling in the ring late last month.
The 18-year-old, who plays both women’s football and hockey, said she had never considered boxing before – but now had a taste for it after her first victory.
“There was someone going around inviting people to stuff at freshers’ week and they said we should give it a go,” Inkster told Shetland News.
“We were out that night and all just decided, ‘let’s do it’.”
Inkster was part of the Shetland women’s football team at the Island Games last summer, while she has represented the blues on the hockey pitch in the junior inter-county.
She said her sporting experience had drawn her to giving boxing a go.
“I’m such an impulsive person,” she laughed. “I signed up to do a May half-marathon in January.”
After undergoing eight weeks of intensive training, Inkster’s first opponent pulled out just two days before the bout.
She then went through the training a second time – while out on a nursing placement at a local hospital in Glasgow.
“I don’t know how I actually functioned with the training,” Inkster admitted.
“The training was at 8pm and I was coming off of nightshift. We did eight weeks of circuits and then sparring for the last two weeks.
“It was terrifying, because only one girl would show up to training. So I was having to spar with six feet tall boys when I’m only five feet [tall].
“You’re thinking, ‘why am I doing this?’”
Inkster’s opponent had won a fight the week before their bout, which she said made her “even more nervous”.
And the usually chatty teenager said that anxiety completely overwhelmed her before she stepped into the ring.
“Everyone was saying I just went non-verbal,” she laughed.
“My coaches were trying to speak to me but I was not okay, I was just silent.
“They told me to take a deep breath because I was shaking.”
But when her ring walk-on song – Crazy in Love by Beyonce – started, Inkster said that “something just came over me”.
“Everyone else was walking out, but I was like skipping and running out!”
She said that, in a video from the fight, she could see herself carrying out some of the moves she learned in training.
However she admits that, in the all the excitement, she “did forget to shield my face”.
“I told my coaches before, ‘if my nose bleeds don’t tell me’.
“I did bust my nose, it was so swollen.”
When Inkster’s hand was raised by the referee as the winner of the fight, she said all of the emotion came straight to the surface.
“You would have thought I’d won the lottery,” she said.
“I started to cry – I think I was just so nervous, I was just bawling my eyes out.
“I even did a little dance in the ring, that’s so not like me.”
The fight night also helped to raise £3,000 for the Glasgow cancer charity Beatson.
Inkster thanked her coaches and her parents, who she says “obviously weren’t happy when I first told them” about the fight.
“I think they thought, ‘oh my God, what are you doing?’”
However she now has the boxing bug, adding: “I think boxing might be a sport for me.”
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