For­mer world cham­pi­on, Ria Ram­nar­ine, has been ex­treme­ly busy this year.

Start­ing the De­fence Force Phys­i­cal Train­ing In­struc­tors (PTI) pro­gram in Jan­u­ary, Ram­nar­ine bal­anced the phys­i­cal train­ing and hec­tic class­room ses­sions of the course, her job as a per­son­al train­er, her du­ties as an in­struc­tor/coach at Fine Line Fight Fac­to­ry as well as com­plet­ing her sports man­age­ment course with the TTOC. "It was tough. As a world box­ing cham­pi­on, there were cer­tain ex­pec­ta­tions, men­tal­i­ties and at­ti­tudes that I had to deal with, dif­fer­ent from oth­ers. At first I didn't un­der­stand but even­tu­al­ly I was able to go ac­cord­ing to my usu­al phi­los­o­phy that I can on­ly be the best I can be, and that first and fore­most I should live up to my own ex­pec­ta­tions."

De­spite every­thing, she al­so topped the ma­jor­i­ty of ex­ams with A+ grades, ful­filled all re­quire­ments and grad­u­at­ed with her diplo­ma and the TTDF/UWI Jesse Black­man award for train­ing and teach­ing meth­ods.

Two days af­ter grad­u­at­ing, Ram­nar­ine trav­elled to Cu­ba for the Ex­tra­or­di­nary APB/WSB Course. Forty-sev­en coach­es as well as ref­er­ees and judges took part in the hec­tic sev­en day course. She is now one of T&T's four cer­ti­fied 3-Star AI­BA Coach. "The Cu­ba course was very hec­tic, with long class­room ses­sions and vig­or­ous prac­ti­cal ses­sions and the ex­am was a four-part se­ries, test­ing all as­pects of coach­ing with a pass mark of 85 per­cent. I am re­lieved and hap­py now".

Three weeks af­ter the course, she flew to Delaware for the In­ter­na­tion­al Coach­ing En­rich­ment Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Pro­gram (ICECP). "The ICECP is a pro­gram that teach­es about coach­ing across the board. All as­pects of coach­ing in­clud­ing nu­tri­tion, pe­ri­odiza­tion, in­jury pre­ven­tion, re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion, team build­ing, men­tal prepa­ra­tion, and a host of oth­er top­ics.

"We had two weeks at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Delaware, one week at an ap­pren­tice­ship site and two weeks at the US Olympic Train­ing Cen­tre. So in ef­fect, we got a lot of teach­ing in the class­room and was al­so able to get hands-on ex­pe­ri­ence dur­ing our ap­pren­tice­ship."

Ram­nar­ine and an­oth­er box­ing coach from Botswana, were placed at the Cor­ner Box­ing Club, found­ed by head coach and well dec­o­rat­ed for­mer USA am­a­teur box­er, Car­rie Bar­ry.

"I think my col­league, Khu­miso, and I had the great­est ap­pren­tice­ship ex­pe­ri­ence. We both learnt a lot from Car­rie. By the time we left, we didn't have just new friends, but more so, we had found fam­i­ly.