Stephanie Simon, a 29-year-old Marine Corps captain, has navigated a male-dominated world from her eighth-grade wrestler days to her time in the Marine Corps. She soon hopes to make her mark in professional boxing.
Simon, who won the 2023 Olympic qualifier but failed to secure a spot on the U.S. team, will make her professional debut on Sept. 27 in Fayetteville, Georgia, in a fight preceding Alycia Baumgardner’s comeback against Delfine Persoon.
For Simon, the Olympic trials in December were the culmination of years of dedication and sacrifice. But despite winning her weight class, her path to the Olympics remained uncertain due to earlier qualifying complications.
“Winning the Olympic qualifier was something I always wanted to do,” Simon said. “But once I did it, I realized it didn’t really mean anything.”
Simon’s victory at the trials did not guarantee her a spot on the Olympic team. Instead, she was invited to the USA Boxing High-Performance training camp, where she would be judged against the top fighter in her weight class, Morelle McCane.
“It’s basically an internal evaluation,” Simon said. “Our performances go into the overall evaluation system, which includes all the other training we do, lifting and conditioning. After that evaluation, they’ll decide who moves on to the next qualifying tournament.”
Simon, who had attended selection camps two years earlier, knew her chances of earning a spot on the team were slim.
“I had already been beaten and felt like the Olympic qualifiers were a dead-end tournament,” Simon said. “I knew the likelihood of someone getting a spot from someone who was already on the team was very slim.”
She was right — she didn’t make the team because McCane qualified for the 2024 Olympics at the 2023 Pan American Games, winning silver. “I wanted to be captain of the USA Boxing team at the Olympics,” Simon said. “That’s what hurts the most.”
As her amateur career drew to a close, Simon, who had moved to Florida, pondered her next move. Although she had a background in wrestling and considered MMA, she ultimately chose boxing, perhaps with a point to prove. Accustomed to being an outsider, Simon recalled her time at the Naval Academy and her early days in the Marine Corps, where she faced skepticism and resistance to her leadership role. Making challenging, solitary decisions was nothing up-to-date for her—now she had to do it in boxing.
“Until 2016, the United States Marine Corps had regulations, rules and restrictions on what women could do, and women were not allowed to hold positions in Combat Arms,” Simon said. “At 23, while my peers were boxing, I was leading Marines, making decisions that could affect people’s lives.”
In 2017, a year after the rule change, Simon took command.
“As a 23-year-old woman, a girl, being in command of 50 guys who had never seen a woman in that position, in itself, in many ways, was traumatic because I was not well-received,” Simon said. “Our job was basically to take infantry from the ship to the shore and from the shore of the beach back to the ship. We had about 20 amphibious assault vehicles, which are amphibious tanks, basically with machine guns.”
After the trials, Simon embarked on a transformational journey from Florida to California, seeking a fresh start in her boxing career. Her journey was not just a physical move, but a symbolic leap into professional boxing. From training with friends in Orlando to meeting her Olympic hero Henry Cejudo in Phoenix, Simon’s path took her to an unlikely destination: Santa Monica.
“I met Milton Lacroix through a mutual friend, and he took me to one of his fighters’ houses, a mansion in Beverly Hills,” Simon said. “He had a whole boxing ring set up on a basketball court in the backyard. So I ended up sparring with a few guys there, and that was literally my second day in Santa Monica. Pretty frosty. Santa Monica, California, was my ultimate destination. That’s where I live now.”
Known for her pragmatic approach, Simon rents a room in Santa Monica that she found on an app and trains at Churchill Boxing Gym. Her decision to move was prompted by a desire to surround herself with the best and make the most of her recent run in boxing.
Recalling her early days in wrestling when teenage men would tell her, “Who the hell is this girl coming in here to the boys’ wrestling team, trying to fight us and compete with us?” This aversion to fighting fueled her determination to defy the odds throughout her life.
“I have this warrior mentality, but I’m also a woman in a man’s space,” Simon said. “I’ve been doing this my whole f**king life.”
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