Hannah Rapp: “I have always said my goal in this sport is to be the best that I can be.”

Hannah Rapp: “I have always said my goal in this sport is to be the best that I can be.”

After an extremely short amateur career and only nine fights in the professional ranks, Hannah Rapp rolled the dice to challenge the unbeaten Tiara Brown for her WBC world featherweight title earlier this month. Rapp was far from disgraced and performed admirably, despite coming up short on the cards in Florida.

“It was definitely a challenging fight to say the least, anyone could see that,” Rapp told FightPost over Zoom. “She is very stubborn, but so am I, so we were kind of going back and forth in the pocket for much of the fight. Which was not the plan. I definitely abandoned our game plan because I didn’t want to be pushed backwards. My coach and I have talked about it. There are things which we would change or do differently. But it all boils down to what happens in the moment. We will take a lot from this fight and learn from it.”

“One of the big things is not letting things get in my head,” Rapp added. “Within the first 30 seconds, I could see her smiling at me when I was hitting her. Which was a big mental game. I am no stranger to those kinds of things. It’s not new to me. But she just had a presence about her. That’s an experience I will be able to take forward. I think I just abandoned my boing, and going forward, I need to trust that more. When I watch the fight back, and see how well I was boxing and moving around at times, if I had stuck with the game plan and listened to my coach a bit more, I think things would have been even closer, and it might even have swung in my favour.”

Brown and Rapp fought on the latest Most Valuable Promotions show. A main card that featured four world title fights. Rapp received plenty of plaudits and is hopeful that she will be asked back to the big show. But either way, the American wants to keep the momentum going and stay active for the remainder of the year. “It will be great to get another fight or two in before the end of the year.”

Before finding boxing, Rapp had been a long-time athlete. “I ran track in High School and at university for a couple of years,” Rapp told me. “I have been an athlete my whole life. I have done soccer, softball and basketball. You name it, I have done it.”

Rapp found boxing at an extremely difficult time in her life. “It was in March 2020, the university shut down, and we were told to go back home. Then my coaches brought me, and a couple of the others aside, we were not scholarship athletes, and told us they had to make cuts to the program. At that time, I was also going through some difficult mental issues. I was diagnosed with an eating disorder in September of that year. And that spiralled quickly. In December, I got admitted to residential treatment. I spent the next 3-4 months in there. A month after I got discharged from that treatment, I started boxing. I needed something to put all my energy into because I have always had that athletic drive.”

It was probably always somewhat inevitable that boxing would eventually find Rapp. “I was kind of eyeballing martial arts for a long time,” Rapp says. “My dad had a heavy bag in his garage that I would hit. So I just wanted to try it out. The first time I walked into a boxing gym, I knew it was for me. It just set me on fire.”

“It’s given me a lot,” Rapp went on to say. “But for me, it’s all the little incremental improvements that I can make day-to-day. I actually like all the boring stuff. The footwork drills. I can do the boring stuff all day long. That probably sets me apart. I do the fundamental drills all the time. I love making improvements, and I made a lot of improvements very quickly. I was blessed with some natural ability, and also blessed with some natural obsession.”

Rapp had her first amateur fight in April 2022. But it was an extremely short amateur career. There were only eight fights on her resume. “It was really hard to get fights as a female,” Rapp relayed to me. “I think there was only one other girl in my Golden Gloves. So it was a small pool. But we knew going pro was the ultimate goal, and we decided to make the jump.”

Rapp (8-1-1) can take plenty of encouragement from her performance against her fellow American. Tiara Brown might have retained her WBC bauble. But it didn’t come easy. Rapp will undoubtedly come again. The 26-year-old certainly has more to give. “I have always said my goal in this sport is to be the best that I can be. I know that’s not very concrete, but if I follow that path, it will lead me beyond just being a world champion. My coaches and everyone around me say that if I stick to what I am doing now, undisputed is not out of the question. But all the belts are great, but I just want to be the best that I can be.”