Joel Iriarte is almost certainly much closer to the beginning than the end of his days as a professional working inside the ropes. But already, he can’t help but look ahead to another future.
A 9-0 (8 KOs) welterweight banger from Bakersfield, California, Iriarte is 22 and still angling toward the top 15 in the major sanctioning bodies’ rankings. He most recently stopped Eduardo Hernandez Trejo in three rounds on September 20 in Indio, California, starting a new knockout streak after going the distance for the first time in an excellent points win over Kevin Johnson in an eight-rounder at Anaheim’s Honda Center in June.
After fighting four times in 2025, Iriarte expects to be busy again in the new year, starting with Friday’s scheduled eight-rounder against Jireh De Los Santos at Acrisure Arena in Palm Desert, California. He is a top prospect on the verge of contendership, and many – including Iriarte himself – envision multiple titles on the horizon of his early career.
But youth is fleeting and time waits for no one, and Iriarte is leaving nothing to chance. Jorge Zarate, whose Sheer Sports management group guides Iriarte, calls the fighter “mature beyond his years” and “also smart enough to know that boxing isn’t going to last forever.” Despite having single-digit professional fights on his record and being barely old enough to rent a car in California, Iriarte isn’t interested in holding out until his final days in the ring to figure out what comes next.
“From the beginning all the way up until the end,” Iriarte told BoxingScene, “I can see how I want to start my contender route – just as I started my prospect route – up until the world titles, and then make that transition into the real world, hopefully having built something not just in the ring but in the community and in the world. You know, bigger than the titles.”
Bigger than titles? It isn’t easy for many young fighters to see beyond the climb to that sort of recognition, let alone the difficulty of maintaining a foothold at the top of the mountain once they’ve arrived or the struggle to avoid slippage as age and the inevitable erosion of stamina, reflexes and punch resistance drag even the best down the pinnacle’s back side.
But Iriarte isn’t just any young fighter. He has already established a nonprofit – the Warmup Project – and a gym in Bakersfield that specializes in working with kids who are at-risk, neurodivergent or have special needs, providing boxing and self-defense lessons but also self-determination workshops and other support. He was inspired by the work he saw being done at A3 Sports Performance – the gym he joined after he and his family moved from Woodland Hills to Bakersfield when he was a child – and with multiple cousins who have autism, Iriarte has been driven to take a hands-on role at The Warmup gym.
“Seeing how anyone could benefit from it, and then taking it to kids with special needs, how it helps them with bullying and people kind of talking down on them, seeing how they benefited even more from it, was something that I kind of took from it,” he said. “I was like, you know what, I can kind of make this my own thing.”
Even so, Iriarte still has clear aspirations for his boxing career. He wants to keep up his activity, continue taking down increasingly competent opponents – De Los Santos is a 14-2-2 (5 KOs) Texan with extensive experience fighting in Mexico and Colombia – and climb into the rankings to officially become a contender. Then there is the matter of those belts.
Iriarte is a big welterweight – 6ft 1in – with plenty of room to pack on useful pounds and, eventually, take his talents to other divisions.
“I want to be the best,” he said. “And to do that, you have to be able to fluctuate. You know, Manny Pacquiao, everyone does that. You know, eight divisions – all the best do it. So that's the goal, to start at 147, collect a couple world titles and then just kind of go from there up.”
There are no half-measures in this sport. But despite Iriarte’s future-planning, his dedication to boxing is absolute. Building the foundation for a life after boxing has helped him give himself over completely to the all-consuming pursuit – “dying,” as Iriarte described it, “trying to succeed along the way.”
After an excellent amateur career, Iriarte says he finds himself getting further in tune to the pro game with every fight. He recently sparred Ryan Garcia, which nudges him a little closer to the top of the sport, brings his larger vision into clearer focus. The day will come when Iriarte will shift to new things – business, more charity work. He will be ready for it.
“I've been boxing since I was six years old,” Iriarte said. “I graduated high school, I was 18, and I was thinking to myself, ‘You know what? All I know is boxing.’ What’s gonna happen the day that I'm 30-something and I have to hang the gloves up? You know, who was I? What did I do outside of the ring? Because at the end of the day, I see a lot of fighters that have this moment, too, where they finish up with their fights and they're like, ‘Well, what now? Who am I?’”
Those days, with any luck, remain far off in the distance – all but out of view. And Iriarte is already actively discovering some of those answers. Still, he has other boxes to check in the meantime: headlining a card, bringing a big fight to Bakersfield, undisputed status. His work with Garcia, he says, helped bring it all into perspective.
“Just being present in the moment, being present and understanding that, yeah, you put yourself in his shoes, essentially, right?” Iriarte said. “But you want to do things your own way, you know, with your own little touch.
“I definitely got a lot out of it. I was able to recognize a lot about where he's at – and where I want to be.”
Jason Langendorf is the former Boxing Editor of ESPN.com, was a contributor to Ringside Seat and the Queensberry Rules, and has written about boxing for Vice, The Guardian, Sun-Times and other publications. A member of the Boxing Writers Association of America, he can be found at LinkedIn and followed on X and Bluesky.
