ENFIELD: Years of hard work on the mat paid off in a big way for Luken Lawson of Enfield, who captured the U Sports national championship in the 76-kilogram division while competing for McMaster University.
For Lawson, the moment the referee signaled the end of the championship match was something he won’t soon forget.
“My first thought was pure excitement,” he told The Laker News.
“Right after pinning my opponent, I jumped up and ran right to my coach’s corner and jumped onto my coach.”
After the initial celebration, the significance of the moment quickly set in.
“My second thought was a huge sense of pride within myself,” said Lawson.
“In the past the finals have always been hard for me mentally and hard to get over those nerves.”
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Before stepping onto the mat for the final, Lawson carried a tobacco pouch in his left hand, something that holds cultural significance to him as an Indigenous athlete.
“I dropped that pouch on the edge of the mat before stepping on,” he said.
“That sense of pride goes further than within myself, but it is my pride in being from a smaller province and being able to win a national medal.”
Lawson’s gold medal capped off a long journey that included earlier success at the national level. He previously won U SPORTS bronze medals in 2023 at 68 kg and in 2025 at 76 kg, along with three silver medals at the OUA championships, the provincial qualifiers for U SPORTS.
Balancing wrestling with the demands of an engineering degree at McMaster made the achievement even more meaningful.
“This medal is a physical and public way of expressing all the hard work that people don’t see,” Lawson said. “The two sessions per day, the extra workouts, runs, offseason work building muscle, getting over injuries, and balancing all that with an engineering degree.”
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His path to gold was anything but easy.
In his opening match of the tournament, Lawson found himself trailing by nine points with just two-and-a-half minutes remaining. If his opponent had scored again, the match would have ended early.
Complicating matters further, Lawson had also suffered a knee injury during the bout.
“I remember my coach telling me, ‘You’re either hurt, or this is your match,’” Lawson recalled.
“In that moment I thought about all those practices and knew that this was my match. I just needed the next move and then the next.”
That belief carried him through the tournament and into the final, where he secured the national title.
“The trust I put in myself that whole tournament was a huge breakthrough for me,” he said.
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Following the victory, Lawson was overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from back home.
“Right when I stepped off the mat and checked my phone it was filled with messages from friends, family, and old coaches,” he said.
“It was quite overwhelming at first because I didn’t fully realize how many people had an impact on me and how many people were still supporting me.”
Many of the messages, he said, shared a common theme.
“The most common responses were people saying how proud they were because they noticed the hard work I have always put in.”
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Lawson also credited the many coaches who helped shape his career along the way, including one whose instruction directly played a role in the championship moment.
“The move that won me the match was a move I learned from being coached by Morgan Marchand,” he said.
As he reflects on the milestone victory, Lawson said he remains grateful for the support system around him.
“I would just like to thank my family for making me the athlete and person I am, and all my old coaches who have had a huge impact on my life,” said Lawson.