Fundraising efforts will send boxer Nico Hernandez’s parents to Olympics

In a back room at the Northside Team 316 Boxing Club on Tuesday evening, Emiliano Hernandez reached out to Bill Bequette and the two men shook hands.

“Thank you,” said Hernandez, the uncle of Olympic boxer Nico Hernandez. “You just don’t know how much this means to us. Thank you so much.”

Bequette, from the North High Alumni Association, nodded and smiled. Hernandez, his emotions coming through, didn’t let go and repeated himself.

“Nico is one of us,” Bequette said. “And we’re always going to look out for our own.”

And with that, Hernandez’s parents, Lewis and Chello, are headed to the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in August thanks to a supercharged fundraising effort that has, so far, raised $10,900.

“Nico is a North High grad, so am I and so is a lot of our family,” Emiliano Hernandez said. “This would not have been possible without the North High community and the alumni association … the thing that they always say is ‘Once a Redskin, always a Redskin’ and that is so true.”

The original goal was to raise $8,000 in order to send Nico’s parents, which could be crucial for Nico’s gold medal hopes as his father has been his trainer since he started boxing at nine years old.

“It’s exciting, just amazing,” Chello Hernandez said. “We just feel so blessed that this is going to actually happen. Thank God for the people that have stepped up and helped us make this a reality. It’s an important thing for us to be there.”

The money raised was a community effort — $4,500 from the sale of T-shirts and signed mini boxing gloves, $2,250 from a GoFundMe page started by Nico, $2,900 raised in private donations by North wrestling coach Jake Johnston and $1,250 from the alumni group raised via an auction last Saturday at their annual fundraiser. The T-shirts and mini gloves were also sold at the fundraiser.

“Nico reached out to me and I just thought ‘I’ve got to get my butt in gear and help make this happen,’ ” Johnston said. “Nico wrestled for me for a year and was our hardest worker … if there was any way we could help him, I wanted to do whatever I could.”

Nico, who will fight in the light flyweight division, is currently training in Texas with father and will fly to Rio on July 19.

“We feel like Nico can serve a bigger purpose when he gets back from Rio,” Bequette said. “Just like (North High alumni) Barry Sanders and Lynette Woodard, he can be an example to these kids about what you can do if you put your mind to it. Not just in athletics, either. They can see that through hard work you can accomplish a lot of things.”

Emiliano Hernandez said the family has been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support.

“It’s been a hard road, a lot of struggles and (Nico) has accomplished a lot,” Emiliano Hernandez said. “I get emotional when I talk about this family because they’ve been through so much and they’ve always stuck by Nico. It just means so much for them to be able to go to Rio.”

This story was originally published June 28, 2016 at 7:31 PM with the headline "Fundraising efforts will send boxer Nico Hernandez’s parents to Olympics."