I played volleyball through college. Full Malibu Barbie, blonde, tan, hell, I lean into that shit. And I can tell you exactly what it feels like to be told to smile for the team photo with a girl who spent the whole match trash talking across the net, calling shots out that were clearly in, doing the petty stuff that only the players ever see. Then the whistle blows and suddenly you’re supposed to line up, shake hands, let the photographer get the shot everyone needs for the program. My coach called it “being a champion off the court.” I called it performing grace for someone who earned none of it. I did it every time because that’s what you do, you swallow it and smile and everyone gets their picture. What I was dealing with was ego and pettiness. Mariia Hnes was a 16-year-old karate champion standing next to an athlete from the country actively bombing her home and killing her people while her father served in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. She walked off that podium in Venice without a word and the video went everywhere. That’s what Kelsie Kimberlin’s ‘Champ’ is about, and once you know that, every lyric lands completely differently.
The song opens with the kind of direct address that makes you stand up straighter. Kelsie comes in with ” They all want you to be on the sidelines / But you should not be sitting on the bench / I know just what you can do about it / You have got to stand up once again “ and there is zero softness in it. The production is alt-pop and punchy, tight and confident. She’s already decided you’re worth fighting for before the first chorus even drops.
The chorus is where ‘Champ’ grabs you. ” You’re a champion / They can never keep you down / You’re a winner / So don’t let it keep you on the ground / Get up! “ That final command is from someone who’s watched you go down and absolutely knows you can get back up. The way Kelsie delivers it is intimate. You hear genuine belief in every syllable. You feel it settle into your shoulders.
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Then she gets into what winning actually does to you permanently. “Once you’re leader of the race / You never wanna be in second place / Once you’re winner of the gold / You always wanna be the champ again / Once you’re number one on top / You never wanna drop to number two / Once you get the taste of winning / You don’t ever wanna lose again.” This section builds and builds and it sounds like muscle memory activating. Once you know what first place feels like in your body, second place is physically uncomfortable. Kelsie gets that. She’s writing about the thing that happens to you permanently once you’ve hit your own standard, and you cannot unknow it.
Verse two goes for the jugular. “Everybody’s trying to replace you / Say you’ve been already at the top / You just gotta look inside yourself now / There you’ll find the strength to carry on.” The people betting on your expiration date are always the ones who wanted your damn spot. Always. That turn inward at the end of the verse is where the song shifts from encouragement to something more like certainty. You have the receipts on your own resilience. Kelsie already knows.
And then comes the line that stopped me cold: “Bruised flesh will never quiet the truth.” One line. The whole song lives there. You get knocked around and bruised. The truth of what you’re capable of doesn’t care. It doesn’t go quiet. You cannot fucking batter it out of someone who already knows who they are. That lyric is visceral in a way the rest of the song isn’t and it earns every second of what came before it.
Here’s what makes ‘Champ’ different from every other empowerment track you’ve heard this year. Kelsie traveled to Kyiv in September 2025 to film the music video with Mariia, the 16-year-old Ukrainian karate champion I mentioned earlier. And she did it during some of the worst missile and drone attacks of the war. That’s so fucking real it changes the weight of every word. She released it on the fourth anniversary of the full-scale war.
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The video shows one of those attacks while Kelsie and Mariia shelter in a hallway. That’s what they were actually living through while making this. Kelsie said, “I have seen how stressful it is for Ukrainian children to live a normal life while their parents are fighting an enemy who wants to destroy them and their way of life.” She paused on that. Then she added: “Participation in sports helps these kids have a sense of purpose and direction, and brings pride to their warrior parents.” That’s the weight behind this song. You can feel it.
Kelsie is American-Ukrainian, she has tens of millions of views and streams, her productions work with Grammy winners and nominees, and she recently won a United Nations Humanitarian Award alongside the St. George’s Royal Medal of Honor from King Charles. Her documentary about Ukraine, ‘The Last Message,’ has been racking up film festival awards in the Best Documentary category and hits full release later this year. Kelsie went there and filmed through it. This is what it sounds like when someone writes about something that actually happened to them and around them, and the difference is not subtle.
The campaign attached to ‘Champ’ is real and running now. UkrainianChampions.com raises funds for Ukrainian children of soldiers who participate in sports, managed through the Kelsie Kimberlin Foundation. Shit like this is why I cover music.
I still think about those post-match handshake lines sometimes. The smile I manufactured, the way my coach nodded at me like I’d done something noble. I was being a good sport about nothing. Mariia Hnes was 16, standing at a podium in Venice while her country was being bombed, and she just walked. No speech or coach’s approval required. I didn’t have the clarity she had at twice her age in a situation one tenth as serious. ‘Champ’ is Kelsie’s way of telling her she was right. It’s also, it turns out, a damn good reason to stop performing grace for people who haven’t earned it.
