San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Houston-area men showcase their potential
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – With their home gym having contributed Jonathan Horton, Chris Brooks and Raj Bhavsar to Olympic and world championship teams, current gymnasts at Cypress Academy of Gymnastics arrive at the annual USA Gymnastics national championships with large shoes to fill.
Eight current or former Cypress Academy gymnasts competed at Saturday’s junior national championships, and six emerged with some variety of hardware, including two berths on the junior men’s national team.
Garrett Braunton, an incoming senior at Cypress Woods High School, was second in the 17-18-year age division, and Asher Hong, 15, was third in the 15-16 category. Both will be under consideration for international competition in the next year.
Both also won individual medals, with Braunton winning rings and finishing second on floor and third on vault and parallel bars and Hong ranking second on parallel bars and third on pommel horse.
Lazarus Barnhill, who now competes for Oklahoma, was sixth in the 17-18 overall, one spot ahead of John Chou, now of Stanford. Current Cypress gymnast Zachary Nunez was eighth, and OU gymnast Jack Freeman was ninth. Chou led on floor exercise and Barnhill on pommel horse and high bar.
Michael Artlip, who trains at the Jewish Community Center’s Houston Gymnastics Center, was 16th in the 15-16 age division.
In the senior men’s final Saturday night, two-time Olympian Sam Mikulak of Newport Beach, Calif., won his sixth national championship, easily outdistancing the field as he prepares for the upcoming world championships in Stuttgart, Germany.
Mikulak scored 174.15 points over two nights, leading Yul Moldauer of Arvada, Colo., at 168.6 and Stanford University gymnast Akash Modi at 168.25. He was the leading scorer over two days on floor exercise, pommel horse, parallel bars and high bar.
With Colin Van Wicklen of Magnolia suffering from a concussion and unable to compete, the senior division of USA Gymnastics is considerably short of Houston-area representation for the first time in almost 20 years.
The local juniors, however, have promise, said Cypress Academy coach Tom Meadows.
“It’s up there with one of the better groups I’ve had,” Meadows said. (Hong and Braunton) are halfway there. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do.”
Braunton and Hong enrolled at Cypress after their parents moved to Houston for work reasons, Braunton from Washington state and Hong from Plano.
Braunton competed at the national championships in 2017 and qualified for 2018 but missed the event with injuries. He failed to record an execution score of at least 8.5 on just one of 12 events over two days but said he has to increase his routine difficulty to compete internationally.
“My execution is up there,” he said. “But I went to the world championships and saw all the international gymnasts, and their start values are cray high. I want to catch up to them.”
This was the first year that Hong was eligible to compete at nationals, and he attributed his quick success to what he described as a unique team atmosphere at Cypress.
“We help each other, which plays a big part in the sport,” he said. “We need each other.”
Horton, who along with Bhavsar won a bronze team medal at the 2008 Olympics and also won silver on high bar, attributes Cypress Academy’s recent success to Meadows’ coaching acumen.
“I see guys when they’re 13 years old and say, ‘Ooh, he’s not going to make it,’ and by the time they’re 18 they’re college scholarship athletes competing at championships,” Horton said. “I don’t know how tom does it, but he gets every bit of ability out of them.
“He holds a very high standard in the gym, and his expectation level is through the roof. Some guys can’t handle it, but the guys who can come to championships and are phenomenal. He has a great formula for success.”