Kenny Hashimoto is a busy guy.

He’s in his second year as a full-time student and collegiate wrestler at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. That’s class work and at least five days a week of grueling workouts.

Then on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he treks down to the Northglenn Recreation Center and back to practice with the Northglenn Judo Club, one of the elite judo clubs in the United States.

“I don’t get too many breaks during the day,” said 19-year-old Hashimoto.

But instead of caving in under the workload, Hashimoto is thriving.

Hashimoto finished third in the 66-kilogram (145-pound) weight class at the 2005 U.S. Judo Open in early October in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., with foreigners taking the two top spots. He’s the top-ranked junior in his weight class in the nation and third-ranked among all ages. He was an Olympic alternate in 2004 and aspires to be at the 2008 Games in Beijing, China.

“All the kids his age, he’s beaten,” said Warren Agena, an instructor with the Northglenn Judo Club who’s watched Hashimoto progress since he started as a young child.

“We’ve had people just as naturally talented, but didn’t work as hard,” said Agena.

Hashimoto’s not bad on the wrestling mat, either.

He was the Northern Colorado Male Freshman Athlete of the Year for 2004-05 after posting a 19-3 record. He finished second at state his first two years at Thornton High School before winning 5A titles as a junior and senior.

“He’s a mature person, maybe beyond his years a little bit,” said longtime UNC wrestling coach Jack Maughan. “He has the discipline on the mat, and that’s how he’s able to do this.”

The transition from judo to wrestling was easy for Hashimoto.

To the casual observer, judo appears more similar to wrestling than its other Asian martial arts cousins. Judo has no punching or kicking. Like wrestling, there’s plenty of grabbing and throwing. With both, the goal is to put the opponent on his or her back.

“A lot of the mat work in judo correlates really well to wrestling,” Agena said, adding that many wrestlers take judo classes. “He can apply some of the throwing techniques in judo in wrestling.”

Hashimoto’s experience with judo gives him an advantage on the mat because he doesn’t always wrestle conventionally.

“He throws in a lot of things that they don’t cover,” Maughan said. “It’s those little things that makes a huge difference. They react one way and he reacts a different way and they’re in the air.”

Maughan was willing to compromise with Hashimoto to get him to come to UNC. Other coaches shied away because of his commitment to judo.

Besides two-day a week practices, Hashimoto has traveled across the country and world to compete. Hashimoto won the junior and senior divisions at the Irish Open Judo Championships in Dublin on Oct. 22 and 23. In January and February, he’ll travel to Slovakia to train with a 2004 Olympic judo silver medalist. Then he’ll spend much of the next five months training in judo’s birthplace, Japan.

Maughan believes the time training for judo in combination with the experience of competing in international competition makes up for time lost wrestling.

“Some people maybe saw that as a hurdle, where we thought it was well worth it,” he said of Hashimoto.

Hashimoto will redshirt this season, so he’ll have three years to compete to qualify for the Division-I wrestling championships.

UNC wrestling is in its final transitional year to Division-I, the highest level of collegiate wrestling in the country. Maughan sees Hashimoto as key to making a successful move.

 “We want to be a competitive Division I program,” Maughan said. “(Hashimoto’s) somebody that can really put Northern Colorado back on the map, because he’s going to be on the awards stand.”