Edmonds College’s Yusleny Rangel balances taekwondo, family, school

Published 9:10 am Wednesday, June 24, 2026

LYNNWOOD — Some people have a lot on their plates. Yusleny Rangel has an entire buffet.

Rangel, 19, spends each morning helping her mother, Flor Hernandez, around the house before Hernandez leaves to run her cleaning company, Y&A Cleaning Services, at 8 a.m. Once Rangel helps her 13-year-old brother, Alvaro, get ready for the day, she heads to classes at Edmonds College for the next several hours.

With both of her parents working — Rangel’s father, Alvaro Rangel-Castnon, works in construction and is unable to spend much time at home — Rangel takes care of her brother after school before spending the rest of the night doing homework. When she’s out of school, that time is dedicated to helping her mother at work.

Among those responsibilities, Rangel somehow finds time to be one of the nation’s top collegiate taekwondo athletes as a third-degree black belt.

After tearing through the 46-kg division at the National Collegiate Team trials in Fresno, California on April 3, the Everett native earned a spot on the U.S. National Collegiate Taekwondo team for the 2026 FISU Americas Games in Lima, Peru, which will take place from July 22-27.

Whether it’s getting up early to squeeze in morning training sessions at Master Cho’s Taekwondo in Lynnwood before helping around the house, or hitting the mats again between after-school care and nightly homework, Rangel carves out as much time as she can to develop her craft.

If there’s too much to do at home before school, or if she has more homework than usual, Rangel’s training takes a backseat. Her life is dedicated to helping her family, but it’s her family that powers her in taekwondo.

“(My parents) always reminded me that I can do it,” Rangel told The Herald on Tuesday. “They’ve been really supportive as well. There (have) been times where I have wanted to quit or I haven’t wanted to go to practice, and my mom just reminds me that it’s all part of the progress and the long-term goal.”

Rangel first started in taekwondo at the age of five, initially tagging along with a childhood friend whose mother signed her up when she no longer wanted to participate in ballet. It did not take long for Rangel to fall in love with the sport, and she earned her black belt by the age of eight.

By the time Rangel was around 11-12 years old, she approached her coaches about her desire to train at a higher level and take on elite competition. After transferring clubs a couple of times throughout her teenage years, she eventually found an ideal split between Master Cho’s and Twin Tigers Taekwondo in Tacoma.

With Master Cho’s being closer to home, it allows her to train more consistently, primarily under Master Joshua Cho. With Twin Tigers, she’s able to face bigger competition on the national and international levels training under Master Daniel Ramirez.

“With our sport being an Olympic sport, there’s a goal. … There’s more out there for you,” Ramirez said. “So when she’s asking for more training and she’s actually putting in the time to travel from club to club, or her local club and her travel club, that in itself lets you know that she wants more for herself. She’s been showing that for years. When she takes our guidance and our advice, and then her parents are asking for it, that shows that that’s a person that wants to do more. At a younger age, she showed us, and here she is now.”

For Rangel, ‘here’ means a two-time U17 National Champion, a Washington State Champion, and most recently, a spot in the Collegiate Pan-Am Games. In two years, she hopes she can add ‘Olympian’ to her list of accomplishments.

Ramirez believes Rangel has all the tools to get there, but that she needs to display the confidence to match it. Cho agrees, and he has been trying to build up her strategic side heading into the Pan-Am Games since she’ll be facing better competition and cannot rely solely on her talent.

“She’s fast, agile, very stretchy, very flexible, but I feel like sometimes she’s very timid,” Cho said. “So we’ve been working on trying to find ways that she can sneak in shots and things like that. Very Korean style, being able to kind of bait out your opponent to do something so that you can score on them.”

Rangel’s confidence was put to the test in May, when she entered the CONADE National Games in Mexico as part of a Mexican-American team with high expectations for herself to make a deep run. However, she lost in her opening match, and the early exit sent her confidence spiraling.

“I felt really confident, and then once we started fighting, I just completely blanked out,” Rangel said. “Due to that, I lost my first match and I didn’t win a single match, and so that’s when I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m done.’”

Traveling without her coaches, Rangel called Ramirez, crying in a bathroom. She also texted Cho, telling both coaches that she wanted to quit taekwondo. She felt exposed. She felt like she was not good enough to compete at an elite level.

Both coaches talked her through it, and Ramirez immediately scheduled her for one of his local tournaments that brings in elite competition from across the Pacific Northwest just two weeks after her loss in Mexico. The result?

“She won,” Ramirez said. “I didn’t give her the option. I told her she was fighting, so it’s kind of one of those things that when you fall off your horse, you got to get back on whether you want to or not.”

After experiencing the full ups and downs of competition and seeing herself bounce back in a span of just two weeks, Rangel is in a much better place mentally as she prepares for Peru.

“It really did take a toll on my mental health,” Rangel said. “I obviously wanted to quit, but after fighting at our tournament two weeks later, it really was a confidence-booster. … It cleared any doubt that I had on my mind. I just really was set on that I can do it, and it’s not worth it to quit over something that’s just part of the process.”

With Rangel needing to balance as much as she does, the process can be even more challenging. Rangel chose a pre-nursing path at Edmonds College, a decision that was largely influenced by her role at home. After years of taking care of Alvaro, Rangel wants to be that same nurturing presence for her patients in the future.

For Rangel, helping people brings her joy, and that extends beyond nursing. Through her hard work and accomplishments, she has become a role model in both the local taekwondo and Latin-American communities, even expanding the overlap between the two.

Most of the kids that Cho trains range from age nine to 15, and he said that they all refer to Rangel as “Coach Yusleny.” While Ramirez’s travel team ranges from ages 10-22, the younger ones similarly look up to Rangel as someone they want to be like.

“I think she’s a really fun person,” said Scarlet Wilson, 16, one of Rangel’s frequent sparring partners. “She’s like a leader a lot to me, and we can train and work on stuff and have fun at the same time. She’s really passionate about taekwondo.”

Rangel’s success even inspired some of her mother’s friends to get their children involved in taekwondo. She understands a lot of eyes from the Latin-American community are on her, and she wears it as a badge of honor.

“It’s a responsibility,” Rangel said. “It does come with pressure, just because it’s like they’re looking at your every move, and it does feel like you have to not be perfect, but be quite perfect. Obviously I’m human. I have emotions. I have feelings. I feel like the good evens out the bad of it. There’s not really a bad side, it’s just mostly the pressure I have being looked upon by so many kids and also parents.”

Rangel’s presence in the Pan-Am Games will only attract more attention, and she is already ramping up her training. In order to prepare for the higher elevation in Lima, conditioning has been the primary focus. Rangel is training twice a day, getting as many sparring rounds with her Twin Tigers teammates as possible, and running once per day to boost her stamina.

Neither Ramirez nor Cho will accompany her to Peru in July, but Ramirez knows the U.S. National Team coach Damian Villa and plans to take Rangel down to his base in Los Angeles to help them become better acquainted ahead of July.

Arguably the biggest obstacle Rangel has to clear heading into the Pan-Am Games is the financial aspect. The National Collegiate Taekwondo Association will cover some of the costs, including meals, and Rangel has sponsors to help with her equipment, but she is responsible for funding her own travel and lodging.

As a result, Ramirez started a GoFundMe on Rangel’s behalf with a goal of $4,000 to help alleviate the costs. As of Wednesday, the funding has reached just over $1,000.

“It’s not a cheap trip,” Ramirez said. “(Rangel’s) mom works very hard. (She) owns her own cleaning business, so she’s working extra hours, and (Rangel) is going to school and helping her as well. Not only is she working, she’s going to school and she’s training.”

Leaning on her coaches — Ramirez, Cho and Grand Master Ki Seung Cho — her teammates and her religion, Rangel hopes to make her entire community proud at the Pan-Am Games in July.

In many ways, she already has.

“It really was just the support that I had around me that made me realize that I could do it,” Rangel said. “I’m very grateful for all my coaches that are here, because I feel like it really does take a coach to make you or break you. …

“They have shown me that I can do it, and that I’m good enough to be able to do it.”