A Walt Whitman High School senior stood on a World Championship podium in South Korea on Sunday. Preston Park of Huntington Station and his two teammates took the silver medal in the junior men's team event at the 2026 World Taekwondo Poomsae Championships in Chuncheon, finishing second only to the host nation on the final day of the biggest poomsae competition ever held.

Second in the world, behind only Korea

Park competed in recognized team poomsae, the discipline of taekwondo judged on forms rather than fighting: precise, prescribed sequences of stances, blocks and kicks performed in unison, scored the way gymnastics routines are. His trio, with Whye Jing Ong of New Jersey and David Gil of Virginia, worked through the field to reach Sunday's final at the Songam Sports Town Air Dome, where the South Korean team took gold. Chinese Taipei and Hong Kong shared the bronze.

Losing a final to Korea in taekwondo is roughly what losing a hockey final to Canada is: the sport was born there, and this year's championships drew a record field of more than 1,400 athletes from nearly 80 countries. The hosts won 20 of the 42 world titles on offer. The United States still finished third in the overall medal count with 17, and the junior team silver was one of the highest American finishes of the week.

Eleven years in the making

Park, a senior at the South Huntington district's Walt Whitman High School, has been at this since he was six years old. His father, Master Jay Park, who is also his coach, started him in taekwondo as a way of connecting a second-generation Korean American kid with the language and culture of his grandparents. It took: he has said he was hooked from his very first competition, a state tournament where he came home with three gold medals.

This was his fourth time wearing the Team USA uniform, a run that started when he was a seventh grader at Stimson Middle School. He earned his spot on this team at the national trials in Tulsa in late January, qualifying in two events. In Chuncheon he also competed in the junior mixed pair alongside Anna Chang of California, the partner with whom he won gold at the U.S. Open in March; the pair did not reach the podium this time.

A medal four years in the waiting

The silver is not his first at a world championship. In 2022, as a 13-year-old, Park and Julia Cho of Bayside took silver in the cadet mixed pair in Goyang, a result USA Taekwondo recorded as the first American medal ever won in that division. The years since took him to the cadet worlds in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2023 and the first virtual taekwondo world championships in Singapore in 2024, part of a career his family tallies at more than 200 medals across sparring, poomsae and virtual competition.

Sunday's result puts him in rare company locally. World Championship medals in any sport almost never route through Long Island high schools, and Park now has two of them before finishing high school.

Home Tuesday

The championships wrapped up Sunday evening in Korea, and Park is expected back in New York on Tuesday, presumably straight into a school week. His stated long-term plan, going back to interviews he gave as a middle schooler, has never changed: keep making the national team every time there is a team to make, and one day coach the sport himself.

South Huntington has followed this student's career for years, and the school community that watched a seventh grader bring home silver now gets to watch a senior do it again on the sport's biggest stage. Somewhere in Huntington Station there is a trophy shelf running out of room, and that is the best kind of storage problem.