SAVANNAH MARSHALL has watched women’s boxing change beyond all recognition in the last decade, but the Hartlepool fighter admits the explosion in the sport’s profile and popularity makes it even tougher for her stay at the top.

When Marshall first joined the Hartlepool Headland club as a fresh-faced 12-year-old, it was still exceptionally rare for a girl to be training in a boxing gym. For five or six years, she struggled to arrange a fight, and even when she was promoted to the British national squad, opportunities to compete on the world stage were still few and far between.

Today, thanks to the spotlight afforded by London 2012 and a successful attempt to promote boxing as a way of persuading more girls to take up a physical activity, the female version of the sport in Britain has never been stronger. The same is true in the United States, Japan and a host of former Soviet nations that have previously dominated the men’s amateur game.

The upshot is that when the likes of Marshall compete in global competitions, they no longer feel like they are being shuffled to the margins. Qualifying in the first place, though, is that much more of a challenge.

“When I first started at my club, I was the only girl,” said Marshall, who enjoyed her greatest moment when she claimed a Commonwealth Games gold medal in Glasgow in 2014. “It stayed like that for a while, but now there’s three senior girls and loads of juniors coming through.

“It’s completely different now. Before, people thought it was weird if there was a female bout at a show, and it always felt like they wanted to get it out of the way so they could get on with the men’s fights. Now, you might get three or four women’s fights and if they’re big ones, they get the same profile as the men.

“That’s great, but it means there’s all these good girl fighters coming through and you have to stay right at the top of your game to keep ahead of them.

“It’s the World Championships in Kazakhstan in February, and they’re the main qualifiers for the Olympics. In the past, I might have turned up at a tournament like that and only had to win one fight to get through to the semi-finals.

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“Now, I’ll have to win three or four fights to get a medal, and you have to get to the semi-finals to qualify for Rio. It’s so much tougher, and since London, the competition has become much more fierce.”

With that in mind, Marshall has not picked the best of years to suffer a succession of injury blows. The 24-year-old suffered a shoulder injury shortly after last year’s Commonwealth success that sidelined her for almost six months, and even when she returned to the ring, a tendon problem with her hand forced her to spend more time recuperating.

She suffered a disappointing first-round exit at the inaugural European Games – admittedly losing to the reigning European champion, Nochka Fontijn – and will head into her winter training programme aware she will have to be at her sharpest when the World Championships begin.

“The last year’s been a bit up and down,” she said. “The operation set me back a long way because I missed a lot of boxing and it’s taken time to get back up to full speed.

“I came away with a bronze medal from the first international competition I came back to in June, but the competition after that (European Games) didn’t go too well.

“It’s all been a bit all over the place, but I’m putting that down to having been inactive for so long. That’ll have to change at the Worlds, and as I’ve said before, I think my weight category is the toughest of the three in the Olympics.

“The Olympics put a few different weight categories together, so at my weight you’ve got some really big girls who can bang and pack a punch.”

Marshall splits her week between British Boxing’s high-performance centre in Sheffield and her home in Hartlepool that enables her to continue to train under the watchful eye of Tim Coulter at the Headland club.

She is also an ambassador for the Sky Academy, and has been involved in the ‘Confidence Month’ initiative which has seen a number of high-profile sporting figures visiting schools and youth organisations to help promote sport as a way of increasing the confidence of those aged between 11 and 24.

“I wasn’t confident at all when I started out,” said Marshall. “I was this really shy girl that didn’t feel comfortable doing anything that was out of my comfort zone.

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“Boxing helped change that, and the work I’ve been doing with Sky has also made me a much more confident person. I can go into schools and talk to people about my experiences now, and I would never have been able to do that even a few years ago. It’s a big thing, and it’s definitely helped change the way I am in certain situations.”

* Savannah Marshall was speaking at the launch of Sky Academy Confidence Month. Sky Academy is a set of initiatives that use the power of TV, creativity and sport to help young people unlock their potential and since launching in November 2013, has helped over 250,000 young people across the UK and Ireland, with a goal of helping one million by 2020. Go to sky.com/academy.