A member of the World Rugby Hall of Fame, Phaidra Knight is all about embracing challenges. She discovered rugby while in law school, making her debut with the U.S. team the year she graduated. She participated in three Women’s Rugby World Cups and was named USA Rugby’s Player of the Decade in 2010. After retiring from competitive rugby in 2017, she served as president of the Women’s Sports Foundation and developed a career as a commentator, podcaster, speaker and coach. She also leads a nonprofit, PeaK Unleashed, focused on empowering girls and women through sport and health initiatives.
In 2019, Knight began training to become a Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighter. She had a Muay Thai event in spring 2021 and her first MMA fight in August 2021. Now, at 51, she is pursuing the career intent on showing age isn’t an obstacle and is presently trying to line up her next fight.
“It’s particularly difficult for women because the pool is so much smaller to schedule fights,” Knight said. “I’m in that process now with the hope to fight in May and get a few fights in this year to build my pro experience and my record.”
Always a sports trailblazer — she is being inducted into the LGBTQ Sports Hall of Fame in June — she wants to learn various disciplines in martial arts and continue on competitively. Knight feels she has a tremendous amount of athleticism and desire to do this and believes she can succeed.
“Every six months I kind of assess how I am feeling … from an analytical perspective,” Knight said. “I continue to find ways to feel good, to train six days a week and to increase my skillset. I do it because I can and I also want to prove to myself and to the world that the process of aging and age are two different things. If you can get an understanding of your own physiological landscape, you can control to some degree the process of aging and still perform. My goal is to perform at a world class level in this sport.”
As Knight continues to thrive athletically, she also hopes to create opportunities and develop businesses around the needs of women over 50. “Women who don’t necessarily want to compete as athletes in the way I am, but who want to continue to be athletic,” she said. “I live it daily, so there’s no better person to do that.”
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