This article recaps a segment from The Rush's Monday, Oct. 19, 2026 episode. Watch the full show.
Bingham Miners junior Kamryn Newman won the 6A first singles state championship on Oct. 10, beating Lone Peak's Ava Jensen 6-1, 6-0 in the final at Liberty Park, as the Deseret News reported. Two years earlier, she wasn't sure she would make it to state at all.
"My freshman year, two days before state, I got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes," Newman said. "I actually convinced the doctors to let me out a little bit early so that I could play. And I went straight to state from the hospital."
This time she left with a title. "It was just such an honor and privilege that I could win state, when exactly two years ago I would be in the hospital," she said.
Learning to manage the condition took time. "The first year I got diagnosed, I couldn't play any tournaments," she said. "I would travel all the way there, and I would just keep getting sick because I couldn't really figure out how to handle it." That has changed. "I haven't had to pull out of any recent tournaments, and at state my blood sugars were great and I felt very well."
Newman was the top seed last year too. "Last year I put so much pressure on myself," she said. "This year I was like, just focus, just zone in on the match, not focusing on who's there to watch me or what the score is. Just focus on this point until I finally win. Then I can celebrate with everybody who was there."
Playing a match a few hours before the final helped calm her nerves. "Right as I started going, I just started getting into a rhythm," she said. "Once I won, it was kind of just like a sigh of relief, like I finally did it. After two years, this has been a dream of mine."
Her only loss this season came in her first match, a third-set tiebreaker against a good friend from Hillcrest. "Besides that, I was undefeated," she said.
She had never faced her opponent in the final, so she watched part of her four-hour match earlier that day. Against new opponents, she uses the 10-minute warmup to look for a weakness. "Every time I go to their backhand, they go crosscourt to my backhand, so I can kind of expect it and cheat over there so I don't have to run as much," she said. "It usually takes three or four games to figure out what their weakness is."
Newman credited her private coach at her club and Bingham's coaches. "They're so supportive," she said. "They would give great advice in matches." She has one more season with the Miners.