The Juneau Tornadoes took home fourth-place honors at the Tanana Invitational Middle School Wrestling Meet on Saturday in Fairbanks.<\/p>\n
Jamal Johnson, an eighth-grader at Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School, went undefeated on the weekend to claim the 140-pound title. Johnson and five other Tornadoes reached the finals in their respective weight classes, a performance Tornadoes coach Loren Cummins called “absolutely amazing.” The club sent 15 youth to the meet.<\/p>\n
“They wrestled the best they’ve wrestled all year, it was great,” Cummins said.<\/p>\n
Cummins coached over half of the team as the Dzantik’i Heeni coach. Cummins said he was happy to see hard work pay off for Johnson. <\/p>\n
“He’s the hardest working kid I’ve seen in a long time,” Cummins said. “His work ethic is just the best and I’m happy for him because he deserves this. He works harder than anybody I’ve seen in a long, long time.”<\/p>\n
Brothers Colton and Carson Cummins were perfect right up until their respective finals. Colton was the runner-up in the 70-pound bracket after getting pinned by Kenton Cooke of Anchorage in the championship match. In the 84-pound finals, Carson would go down to Joseph Spangler of Wasilla that broke a four-match win streak.<\/p>\n
Siblings Thomas Baxter and Cailynn were runner-ups in the 160 and girls 120 brackets. Evelynn Richards would place second in the girls 120-pound bracket. <\/p>\n
\u2022 Contact sports reporter Nolin Ainsworth at 523-2272 or nainsworth@juneauempire.com. Follow Empire Sports on Twitter at @akempiresports.<\/b><\/p>\n
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A proud coach moment. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":425,"featured_media":44091,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":6,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-44090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/425"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44090"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=44090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}