Trainer Martin Snow ’78 on Working With the Regis Boxing Club
The Regis alumnus on training Regians, veterans with PTSD, and the occasional Real Housewife.
Growing up in Brooklyn, Martin Snow ’78 loved sports, and when he transferred to Fordham University as a junior, he began looking for a way to scratch his competitive itch. He set out to make the baseball team and spent the summer before his senior year at the batting cage, working on his swing so he could impress the school’s coach during tryouts. When the big day arrived, he stepped to the plate and promptly struck out on four pitches. He asked the coach if he’d get another chance to bat and prove himself as a hitter, and he was told that he would not. The coach suggested he try slow-pitch softball.
Snow was crushed. He was still looking for an athletic outlet and had come to realize that he wouldn’t be finding one on campus. But around this time, he read a story about the professional boxer Gerry Cooney. Snow’s grandfather had been an amateur boxer before becoming a police officer, and Snow was intrigued by the possibility of fighting himself. So he went to Gleason’s Gym and handed over $10 to try the sport for the first time. Again he was met with rejection, when a trainer on that first visit told him he’d never make it as a fighter. But he was already hooked, and that first lesson set him on a path that would change his life.
“I started training at Gleason’s, and this whole world opened up to me,” said Snow. “I had this mystical experience. Boxing to me is a mystical experience.”
Snow didn’t immediately make a career of boxing. He took a job working in construction after college, and he drifted away from the sport for a while. One day, a coworker asked him to take him to the gym that he’d still sometimes talk about, and back to Gleason’s he went. He caught the bug again, and this time it stuck for good. He began training and made it all the way to the finals of the amateur Golden Gloves tournament at Madison Square Garden, losing the super heavyweight novice championship bout to a fighter named Anthony Green.
When a workplace injury kept him away from his construction job, he decided he wasn’t ever going back to it. And while the same injury also dashed his hopes of a professional fighting career, he began taking work as a trainer wherever he could get it. He started teaching boxing classes at health clubs with another trainer. He taught boxing to New School students for five weeks. He began training businesspeople downtown for $10 a lesson. When a friend opened his own boxing gym, Snow started working there, too.
When that gym closed, Snow and a few friends decided to start a gym of their own, and in 1997 they opened Waterfront, which lasted for seven years. But Snow was determined to try again, this time on his own. In 2004, he opened the Trinity Boxing Club, then located on Greenwich Street in Manhattan. He was the sole owner, and this time, everything clicked. Snow now owns three gyms under the Trinity banner: two in downtown Manhattan and one in Los Angeles.
“What I couldn’t do, I taught other people to do,” said Snow. “My life is a series of failures, but it’s what I did after I failed that made the difference.”
As Snow solidified his business, he began to get noticed for his work. The Trinity Boxing Club’s website refers to Snow as a boxing savant, a professional philosopher, and an amateur psychiatrist, and this combination has appealed to clients who are looking for more than tips to throw a better punch. He’s trained the likes of Liev Schreiber, Carmelo Anthony, and Kit Harrington, and he began making appearances on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New York City, where he trained cast member Leah McSweeney on camera. Once afraid to speak in public, he found he loves being himself on TV.
But Snow’s clientele isn’t just celebrities and Wall Street workers. He works with veterans with PTSD and other groups who might find some measure of healing through boxing. And last fall, he reached out to Regis to offer his services if there was interest in starting a school Boxing Club. There was, and in March, more than a dozen students traveled for their inaugural training session to Snow’s Vesey Street gym, which is plastered with old boxing photos, religious imagery, and inspirational quotes with sources ranging from the Bible to Babe Ruth.
To Snow, giving back to Regis is an opportunity to reach students who, like him, could have used a gym like Trinity.
“I wish there was a place like that when I was going to school,” said Snow. “I never could have done some of the things I did without a trainer in my corner who said, ‘Yeah, you can do it.’ I’m the guy in their corner.”
English teacher Ms. Rebecca Fitle serves as the club’s moderator and said that while Snow is unlike anyone students encounter during a typical school day, his approach to teaching boxing aligns with Regis’s commitment to cura personalis, or care for the whole student.
“He constantly reminds students that God made each of them to be unique as he teaches them to become fluent in ‘body intelligence,’ and he encourages them to be courageous rather than perfect. He likes to say that it’s more important to be famous on your block than on a tiny screen, and he practices what he preaches through the care and love he has shown our students during our weekly visits to his gym.”
Snow isn’t just teaching Regians about jabs and hooks; he’s giving students the opportunity to grow both physically and mentally and to find community with fellow club members. Boxing isn’t just a sport to Snow; it’s something closer to a life philosophy. And so as he trains them on the mechanics of the sport, he also peppers in life advice.
“Kids that say, ‘I got to take a test.’ No, you don’t,” he said. “You get to take a test. You get to struggle. You get to do these things. These are the things I did not learn in school, but I am here to teach them.”
This article appears in the Spring 2026 issue of Regis Magazine.
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