Liberty is sending 23 team members to this weekend's NCTA Championships in Marlborough, Mass.
Taekwondo team preparing for NCTA Championships near Boston
4/9/2025 1:45:00 PM | Taekwondo
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Liberty will enter 23 student-athletes, including five black belts, into this weekend's fighting and forms competitions.
A total of 23 members of Liberty University's taekwondo team will travel to Marlborough, Mass., on Thursday morning, to compete in the National Collegiate Taekwondo Association (NCTA) Championships from Friday through Sunday.
"It will be a lot of fun," Flames Head Coach Tom Childress said. "I enjoy it because I get a ring-side seat. The camaraderie of competition, being in the ring, shows why you're in it. It's what you're training for all year. You want to go out there and compete to your very best ability and show the skills you've been working on. I am proud of our whole team, how hard they've worked and how hard they compete, and we know there is going to be a really good competition."
The NCTA tournament is an individual competition with national champions awarded in all black belt and color belt divisions after Friday's preliminary rounds and Saturday's finals. For Sunday's Collegiate Cup team competition, Childress will put the Flames' and Lady Flames' best three-man and best three-woman teams together, with one lightweight, one middleweight and one heavyweight in the A Division (for black belts), B Division (for higher color belts), and C division (for white and yellow belts).
The Flames and Lady Flames have five student-athletes not able to compete due to recent injuries and illness. The majority of those that are going will be competing in the color belt divisions, including senior green belt Hannah Wharton, who recently recovered from a broken foot that kept her sidelined for five weeks.
"We have some really exciting white and yellow belts who have done well in forms and fighting," Childress said. "(Seniors) Ricardo Huezo and Katrina McMillen are newly minted yellow belts who have medaled in (recent) competitions."
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Lady Flames junior green belt Kaileigh Lowry practices her kicks in Candlers Station.
Team members entered in the black belt divisions include juniors Ericson Lehmann and Jackson Hale, seniors Seth Whitesell and Chyanne Armes, and freshman Joseph Norris. Two others — junior red belt Julia Eesley, who won a gold medal as a blue belt and a silver medal as a red belt, and graduate Sophia Varrati — will be testing for their first-degree black belts on May 3.
Northeastern University, a member of the East Coast Taekwondo Conference that Liberty has competed in along with the  Atlantic Collegiate Alliance of Taekwondo (ACATA), will be hosting this year's national competition. Teams in the ECTC, including Cornell, MIT, Harvard, and Yale, typically have more competitors than Liberty brings to tournaments.
The University of Texas at Austin, the five-time defending NCTC champion, had 80 competitors at last year's national event hosted by the University of California, Berkeley, where Liberty only sent a dozen team members, winning four medals.
Childress said a lot of brackets will be wide open with opportunities for upsets along the way.
"There is a lot of speculation until you get there and fight your fight," he said. "The score is going to be what it's going to be at the end. As long as they go out there and give everything you've got, that's exactly what I ask of them. If they go out there and put everything they've got into it, the results will speak for themselves."
With fights and poomsae forms competitions going on in eight rings simultaneously, Childress is thankful to have a couple of alumna assistant coaches, Cameron Connelly and Jenna (Green) Gonino, a United States No. 1-ranked lightweight female fighter who earned her B.S. in Nursing at last May, helping to monitor all of the matches involving Flames and Liberty competitors.
