Devlin sisters on road to glory

Not when the sisters in question are state champion boxers, with their eyes on the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast.

Murray High School pair Tanisha and Ebony Devlin are on a rapid rise to the top in women's boxing, after both claming state championships in Bargo last weekend.

The sister act, 17 and 16 years old respectively, have only been boxing for 18 months, after watching their boxing trainer father Rob go about his work for a number of years.

“It's a sport that I'd always wanted to do,” Tanisha said.

“I tried it out and found that I really enjoyed it, so I've set myself a few goals and I'm getting closer to achieving them.

“I was able to get a big one out of the way with the state championships, which was really exciting.”

Tanisha said she and Ebony had found plenty of support among their peers for their sport of choice.

“A lot of my friends didn't think I would be the kind of person who would be into boxing,” she said.

“But they've all been very supportive of it.”

The quietly spoken Ebony is a much more aggressive fighter than her older sister Tanisha, who father and trainer Rob Devlin says skews towards the more technical spectrum.

Devlin says the biggest obstacle the pair have had to overcome is the lack of female sparring partners.

“In the last two months, we would have travelled around 4000 kilometres,” Devlin said.

“The girls have been to training camps at the AIS, they're off to a two-day training camp with the New South Wales Institute of Sport in a couple of weeks, and we've travelled to a number of different places for them to have exhibition matches, just because the number of female fighters is so low. 

“There's definitely a massive gap between the amount of male and female fighters, but hopefully we'll see that even up in the future.”

For their part, both girls had a clear message to any women thinking of giving boxing a try.

The more competition they have, the better.

“It'd be good to see more women come into the sport,” Tanisha said.