Submitted by Mark Huard

Braden Littlefield is a sixth grader at Benton Elementary School and has always played many sports including football and baseball. A year ago Braden started boxing and hasn’t stopped since. He had 12 boxing matches on the amateur circuit where he traveled as far as Virginia with his teammate Cain Shatzer, from Bethel. Littlefield won a bout at this national tournament.

Recently he and his three other teammates featured in the photo (Cain Shatzer, Braden Littlefield, Emma Jones and Quinton Hernandez) traveled to Worcester, Massachusetts, this past Saturday. All four captured Jr. Olympic titles.

This group of youth traveled to Canada this year as part of a USA team that competed internationally. Littlefield has captured a New England Silver Gloves championship, along with his teamate Quinton Hernandez, from Old Town, who both moved on to a Regional Championship bout in Herkimer, New York. Littlefield lost a controversial decision to a more experienced New York fighter, and Hernandez won the Regional Silver Gloves Title, but was unable to compete in the nationals due to fracturing his shoulder in the title bout.

All four of these young boxers train together several times a week at Cugno Boxing Gym, in Lewiston. All of the fighters travel quite a distance to train at this gym. Emma Jones is the only local youth coming out of Auburn. They find various meeting spots, but travel and remain a team. They all spire to go as far as they can in the sport which includes fighting as many bouts as they can to gain ring experience.

These young boxers have many older and more experienced boxers in the gym that they look up to, including Breanna Ingalls, who recently joined the U.S. Coast Guard. They all fight under the name Cugno Boxing, for Glenn Cugno, who is a professional boxer that trained with Joe Gamache Sr. at the Lewiston Armory for over 30 years. Cugno took over the gym but remains coaching with Joe Gamache Sr. Coaches Dan Escobar and Scott Frost making up the rest of the coaching staff. Cugno and the rest of the coaches donate any time they have outside of their full time jobs to help these kids stay on a positive path and reach their dreams.

Adrian O’Connell, of Benton, served as an honorary page in the Maine Senate on Thursday, March 15. During his visit he met with his state senator, Scott Cyrway (R-Kennebec). The honorary page program gives students from third grade through high school an opportunity to participate in the legislative process for one day’s session in either the House or Senate. For more information about the program, please contact Senator Cyrway’s office at 207-287-1505.

Abigail King of Benton, a member of the class of 2018 majoring in civil engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), in Worcester, Massachusetts, was a member of a student team that recently completed an intense, hands-on research project in Ecuador. The project was titled Assessing Sustainable Bio-construction Alternatives. In their project outline, the students wrote, “Our goal was to cooperate with the Azuay Prefecture, San Rafael administration, and community members to contribute to sustainable bio-construction designs that are locally appropriate to the parish of San Rafael. We incorporated a human-centered design approach to this project to ensure desirability, feasibility, and viability of our materials assessment.”

At WPI, all undergraduates are required to complete a research-driven, professional-level project that applies science and technology to addresses an important societal need or issue. About two-thirds of students complete a project at one of the university’s more than 40 off-campus project centers, which are located around the world. A signature element of the innovative undergraduate experience at WPI, the project-based curriculum offers students the opportunity to apply their scientific and technical knowledge to develop thoughtful solutions to real problems that affect the quality of people’s lives-and make a difference before they graduate.

“The WPI project-based curriculum’s focus on global studies brings students out of the classroom and their comfort zones and into the global community to apply their knowledge to solve real problems,” said Professor Kent Rissmiller, interim dean of the WPI Interdisciplinary and Global Studies Division. “Students are immersed in all aspects of a different culture, from the way people live and work to the values they hold to the foods they eat-all valuable perspectives for surviving and thriving in today’s global marketplace. They also learn the meaning and magic of teamwork; make a real and meaningful difference in their host community; and gain a competitive edge for any resume, or graduate or professional school application.”