Shannon Clark has always been a competitive person. She played soccer through university and always enjoyed the throws throes of competition. So when it was time to move on from soccer, she found her new outlet.
“Once my university soccer career ended, it was more like ‘let’s just take up training a bit more’. It was my competitive side that said, let’s take one fight and see how I do and then it was like – maybe I got lucky let’s try again,” Clark said. “Now here we are, 7 fights in.”
It sounds so simple and almost like an accident in the way that Clark described it – and that’s almost as it feels to her. She’s heading down the path that may lead to much bigger and better fights. Still it seems to surprise her at every step of the way.
“After that [first fight] it was really bad – I mean, whose first fight is nice to look at?” she said. “Then the second fight I was like, maybe I’m still lucky. Then after my third fight I was like, well I have to turn pro now and maybe I do one pro fight. Maybe it’s just the amateur I’m good at.”
With those wins piling up in big numbers, she has to have started believing this is more than just luck, right? She has to think, this is for real and I can do this at a high level.
Not exactly.
“I’m still kind of shocked to be honest with you. I’ve never been in a bar fight, I’ve never punched anyone in my entire life until I got into the cage… My next goal is just to win this fight,” Clark said with a laugh. “I don’t look to much past the fight I’m in because I just focus solely on that. My goal was to be flown somewhere to fight and that’s happening.”
Clark will look to keep proving to everyone else, as well as herself, that she’s good at this whole fighting thing at LFA 170. She takes on Nejra Repp as part of the main card on UFC Fight Pass this Friday.
You can hear the entire audio of this interview at 46:38.
