But if you look at her passport, you’ll see that over the past year or so she made one trip to Lima, Peru and another to Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Saturday she leaves for Jakarta, Indonesia.
Just as telling is that blue jacket she sometimes wears. There’s a U.S. flag on the top of one sleeve and down near the wrist, the inscription “land of the free, home of the brave.” In big letters across the back is TEAM USA.
Fisher is one of the top teen-age karate competitors in the United States. She won the U.S. Team Trials in 2014 and again this past July. In August she fought in the Pan American Karate Federation Championship in Bolivia and Nov. 14 she competes in the WKF Junior World Championships in Indonesia.
Already the nation’s top junior in the 68 kg-plus (heavyweight) fighting class and having won a bronze medal after losing a close match to the gold medalist in the recent Senior U.S. Trials, she has a legitimate goal of the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, where karate and as many as four other sports are expected to be added as medal sports.
“I’m crossing my fingers, she certainly has the tools and desire, but she’s still developing,” said Doug Yates, once a top international karate competitor and now the owner and top instructor at Doug Yates Karate in Xenia, the dojo Nicole calls “my second home.”
“She has been such a great leader for our school, a real role model for the younger kids,” Yates said. “In here she’s not boastful, she’s quiet and respectful. But when it’s time to compete, she changes. She turns it on. She’s fast and her timing is impeccable.
“She really is an elite athlete.”
Made instant splash
Ten years ago, Tony Fisher, Nicole’s dad, was in the U.S. Air Force deployed to Qatar.
He had recently relocated his family from Misawa, Japan, where they’d lived for seven years, to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. His wife Suemi, originally from Okinawa, was looking for something to involve their two children in during his absence.
“My son wanted to take some martial arts, so he started taking Muay Thai kickboxing,” Tony said. “As my wife was taking him to practice, Nicole became interested in it, too. She was 9.
“As she learned the techniques and started to earn more belts, she began going to local competitions and that’s when it really started clicking.”
Nicole initially trained at another school in Kettering, earned a black belt and competed in a different style of karate at tournaments all along the East Coast.
“Then we went down to South Carolina three years ago and watched Doug’s team compete at the USA Nationals,” Tony said. “Right off she said ‘I want to do THAT next year.’ ”
That “next year” was 2014 and she made an instant splash.
“Her first year on the national level she ended up winning the U.S. Team Trials and becoming a member of Team USA,” Yates said with a smile.
She said the switch to Yates’ school has brought out the best in her: “It was a totally different experience. I had more people to fight and it was just a higher experience for me. It was more of a challenge and I like challenges. I like the adrenaline I feel from all that.”
In Yates she has found someone who knows the international stage first hand. He’s also someone who has been running a school in Xenia since 1976.
“I was playing on the high school baseball team and wanted something in the offseason to stay in shape. I’d seen Bruce Lee in “Enter the Dragon” and a friend told me (martial arts) was great for conditioning and flexibility.
“A guy named Myles McMahan and I both got our black belts together and we opened up a karate school over on Lower Bellbrook Road. I was still a senior at Xenia High.
“The tornado had come through Xenia in ’74 and my senior year we still were going to school only half days. So I’d go to baseball practice or games and then I’d come to our school and teach evening classes.”
Yates eventually made the U.S. team and competed in places like Ireland, Bermuda, Italy and Canada. At age 36, he won a gold medal for the U.S., competing as a karate heavyweight in the 1994 Goodwill Games in St. Petersburg, Russia.
His current school is in a strip mall on N. Allison Avenue in Xenia and has some 70 students. But the star of the show is Nicole, not just for what she’s done in competition, but by the way she works with the younger kids there.
“She’s really a role model to them and she knows that,” Yates said. “She’s very mature for a 19-year-old young lady. She knows these kids all look up to her and so she does everything she can to influence them the right way.”
Dedicated to training
Wednesday night as Nicole was putting the finishing touches on her training, her dad stepped off the mat and explained:
“Right now all she’s doing is working on her timing.”
And right now her time is full.
Along with being a full-time WSU student, she trains six days a week.
She works with a personal trainer at Wright-Patt — where both her parents have civilian jobs — and she trains part of the week with Christina Bayley at her Total Taekwondo and Fitness Center in Kettering. There she works on her cardio and gets in some sparring with other Olympic-caliber athletes.
“But Yates is my home,” Nicole smiled. “This is where I do my basic punches and put it all together.”
Yates said she is so dedicated to her training that even when several members of his dojo went along with the Fisher family back to Okinawa this summer, she got up early each morning to work out.
“My wife is actually thrilled to death with Nicole doing this, especially with Doug Yates Karate teaching a traditional Okinawa style. She feels Nicole is learning a little of her culture along the way.”
The dedication is paying dividends, and after the World Championship comes a full slate of junior and senior competitions across the United States and in South America, said her dad, who admitted he and his wife are footing the bill for her travels:
She’s getting better and better, so we’ll see where it goes.”
So what about college?
“I really like Wright State, but I think I’m going to be switching from liberal arts to mathematics,” Nicole said. “I love math.”
But right now only one number matters.
“She’s got a whole game plan figured out for the next year, but her short-term goal is to win gold at the Worlds in Indonesia next week,” Tony said.
“She wants to be No. 1.”
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