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Freestyle / GrecoHigh School

Rylan and Kyler Kuhn left Fargo with a trio of medals

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The St. Pius X brothers, who live in Parkville, competed in two different brackets earlier this month. Kyler was in 16U and Rylan in Juniors at the 2024 USA Wrestling Junior and 16U National Championships in Fargo, North Dakota.

Kyler was a double all-American in freestyle and Greco-Roman, while Rylan added his third All-American medal in freestyle.

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“It was awesome,” Kyler said of his first trip to the FargoDome. “It’s probably one of the coolest and definitely the most fun at a wrestling tournament that I’ve ever done, just because of that we both got an All-American same weight class.”

Rylan, an Air Force commit, posted a 7-2 record in freestyles and took fifth in the Juniors 285-pound bracket. He opened up with four wins — including two pins — but lost in the quarterfinals. He went 3-1 on the backside of the bracket and beat Pennsylvania’s Dean Bechtold by a 6-5 decision.

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“It’s the last wrestling tournament of the summer,” Rylan said. “You spent the whole summer working to leave it out for a whole week. But it’s a unique environment but it’s definitely a really exciting tournament.”

Rylan, who is 18, spent a lot of time in the summer training with his brother and Chopper Mordecai, a Kearney native who wrestles at Appalachian State. Rylan said one of the focus was conditioning, a big deal when it comes to heavyweight brackets.

Rylan didn’t wrestle last summer — or the high school season his sophomore year due to the effects of a concussion. 

He said he was a little nervous heading back to Fargo, but he was busy this summer in tournaments between the MSHSAA state meet and Fargo. He was first in four of those tournaments, including the USA Wrestling Southern Plains Regionals.

“It didn’t take me too long to get my freestyle technique back under my belt,” he said.

A two-time state champion for the Warriors, he said will spend the rest of the summer working toward the Super 32 Challenge in October in Greensboro, North Carolina before the start of the high school season. 

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“I’m just going to focus on fixing some mistakes that I made,” he said. “I’m going back and watch a bunch of film, make some adjustments, re-adjust my wrestling IQ,” he said. “So I’m pretty fired up, ready for that.”

Kyler, who is 15, had a much tougher route to win his two medals, losing in the first round in both but wrestled his way back to earn medals in the 16U 285-pound brackets.

In Greco-Roman, Kyler lost 2-0 to Preston Wagner from Fremont, Nebraska, an all-stater in his state, in the first-round match. 

“Going into my first team matches, I was pretty nervous because it’s definitely the biggest and loudest wrestling environment I’ve ever been in,” Kyler said. “It definitely had an effect on me, because I took two first-round losses in each style … so it’s a crazy environment.”

Kyler won six of the next seven with five of those pins, taking down Illinois’ Jeremy Marshall in the seventh-place match in 1:17.

In freestyle, Kyler lost 5-0 to Illinois’ Connor Williams, before rattling off six wins in a row.

“After my very first loss in the freestyle, I was pretty upset, and my dad texted me, and he said, ‘So what now?”,” Kyler said. “He said ‘Just got to move on put that behind you. There’s nothing you can do about it, so just focus on the next best thing for you.’”

He lost to Wagner in a match to decide if he’d go to third or fifth. In the fifth-place match, the Class 1 all-stater beat Lucas Feuerbach from Iowa, 6-3. 

“The whole summer was leading up to Fargo, so it was a lot of balance in football and wrestling,” Kuhn said. “I’d go to football in the morning and then go to one or two wrestling practices at night with my brother.”

When he wasn’t on the gridiron for the Warriors, he was at Greater Heights Wrestling preparing for Fargo.

The workouts with Team Missouri happened at Platte County High School before going up I-29 to North Dakota. The Kuhn boys, along with their dad, Matt, were gone from July 14-21.

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“For the boys, it’s quite a roller coaster, physically and emotionally,” Matt said. “You know, they wrestle freestyle for three days and then get a day off to make weight for Greco and recover a little bit then wrestle Greco. For them to have to recover match after match physically and then also bounce back after they take a loss, mentally, is quite a challenge. A lot of people are there … and obviously, they kind of took some of the hard way, losing early on. In a bracket that big and hundreds of guys you take a loss in the first round then you get on and look at the path to the podium on the backside, it is daunting. I’m really proud that Kyler was able to do that in freestyle and Greco and bounce back. You have to apply all the cliches you hear about one match at a time and don’t look ahead and wrestle the guy in front of you, but they really have to apply that and chip away.

“Rylan made his path a little easier and made a run on the front side but lost in the quarterfinals. So when you do that you got to turn around and win two to guarantee a spot on the podium. You know, Fargo’s a big recruiting milestone, a recruiting landmark. You know, if you can place at Fargo, you’re going to get recruited to wrestle at the college level and usually at the Division I level. So that was completely different for the two of them, since Rylan was already committed he didn’t really have that on his plate. He wasn’t worried about college coaches or anything like that. Kyler, on the other hand, was just trying to get on the radar, trying to get his name out there and ensure what he could do.”

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