After over a year on the sidelines, bantamweight Hailey Cowan is set to return to action, with a fight against Nora Cornolle targeted for UFC 315 in Montreal, Quebec this May.
Cageside Press confirmed news of the booking on Sunday, following an initial report of Cowan (7-3) facing Cornolle (8-2) by MMA Junkie earlier in the day.
The fight will mark Cowan’s first since April of 2023, when the Contender Series winner and LFA/Invicta FC alum dropped her promotional debut to Canada’s Jamey-Lyn Horth.
In the nearly two years that have followed, Cowan has seen a pair of fights fall through, against Zarah Fairn and Tamires Vidal. Injuries sustained by Cowan, including a broken shin, scuttled both, and left her with a lengthy recovery. Cowan had actually continued training with the injury, unaware her fibula had snapped.
“A couple weeks ago I rolled my ankle wrestling. I continued training for the fight, thinking I had a bad ankle sprain— if you know me, you know I am stubborn and ignore pain relatively easily, so I didn’t complain much and begged to continue, they allowed me to until they couldn’t,” Cowan wrote on social media at the time. “I continued training for the fight for 2 weeks with physical therapy every day. Wednesday after physical therapy, I very reluctantly went in for an X-ray— I assumed the X-ray would clear me to fight because I was in minimal pain and was functioning on it incredibly well, but it turns out my fibula is displaced and broken. The “dislocation” that I felt was my bone snapping.”
France’s Nora Cornolle is 2-1 in the UFC, and will enter the fight looking to rebound from a loss to the surging Jacqueline Cavalcanti. Prior to that, she’d notched wins over Melissa Mullins and Joselyne Edwards in her first two trips to the UFC octagon.
UFC 315 takes place on May 10, 2025 at the Bell Centre in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The only other fight reported for the event thus far sees Canada’s Brad Katona take on Bekzat Almakhan.
