As Brecksville-Broadview Heights gymnasts, seniors Rachel Kirin and Kyla Haverdill know that there’s only one expectation for how the season ends on Saturday: with the Ohio high school state title.
“It’s definitely a lot of pressure,” said Haverdill, who has been doing gymnastics since she was a baby. “Most people don’t understand that – it’s just so expected.”
Single championships can define a legacy for many athletes and a whole program. Some of the greatest teams in sports – from Geno Auriemma’s UConn Huskies to the Golden State Warriors at the height of the Splash Brothers era – built dynasties by winning three or four titles in a short span. But none of those streaks compare to what a gymnastics team from a public high school in suburban Ohio has done.
That’s because the Brecksville-Broadview Heights Bees have won the state title every year since 2004.
Coach Maria Schneider also feels the stakes rise every year as the number grows – even though she’s been to the meet so many times before. She and her assistant coach, Leah Miko, spend the season trying to tinker with the gymnasts’ routines to add an extra skill to boost their potential scores.
“[Our coaches] are always working together and they take different parts of their knowledge and put it together just to make our routines an extra tenth better,” said Kirin. “And I think that can really set us apart.”
The coaches also try to keep a close eye on other teams across the state that they don’t compete against in the regular season through social media posts and videos and meet reports. Their biggest competition changes year to year, depending on the talent on teams across the state.
This year, the Brecksville-Broadview Heights team has also faced injuries, making the practice time heading into the state meet more limited than the coaches would like. So when asked if she was any less nervous heading into their try for a 23rd consecutive title, Schneider laughed.
“Never,” she said. “Never.”
But even if it’s expected, it takes strong scores in four events from four different gymnasts. And because Brecksville-Broadview Heights is a public school, the Bees can’t recruit gymnasts to help them with the streak. Two years ago, in the 2024 state meet, the team thought they had lost to Magnificat High School, a private school in another west-side suburb of Cleveland.
“We won by a toe point and people were like, ‘Oh, they won again,’” said Haverdill. “We thought we lost. We fully thought we lost.”
The year before that, the meet came down to the final event. In past years, it’s come down to last-minute changes in routines for a boost of fractions of a point to protect the streak.
Like Haverdill, most of the Bees started their gymnastics careers at a young age at Gym World, a private gym in Broadview Heights. Schneider is the daughter of Gym World founders Joan and Ron Ganim. Miko, the assistant coach, trained at Gym World starting at a young age, before winning four titles for the Bees. She competed in college, before coming home and starting as a coach at Gym World and then with her old high school team.
“I grew up [at Gym World] and was in the gym 25 hours every single week,” said Kirin. “I met my best friends here.”
Haverdill said Gym World was like a second family. “Ms Scheider is just like a second mom to me,” she added.
The Bees benefit from Gym World’s policy that encourages club gymnasts to compete for the high school team if they want – Joan and the late Ron Ganim, who were longtime coaches of the high school team, always thought it was important to have fun and help the gymnasts be recognized for all of their work they were doing in the gym each day. Most of the gymnasts on the high school team have not gone on to compete in college – they are level 8s and 9s. Recent exceptions include Alecia Farina, who graduated in 2016 and was a four-time all-around state champion and made history with a perfect 10 vault score during her high school career.
At Gym World and with the high school team, the coaches have a strong focus on mental health. For gymnasts who compete with the high school or club team, there’s sessions called “Psychobabble”, where gymnasts have learned how to build confidence and deal with expectations in and outside of gymnastics. The gymnasts said their head coach, whose father started the psychobabble program, was always coming in with something she read recently or new techniques to try to calm their nerves.
“I think our coaches are really individualized with us,” said Kirin. “They know us all very well and they know how to kind of coach all of us according to how we are. So what they say to me before a beam routine might be different than [what they say to] Kyla, but it’s what we need to hear.”
Though the Bees have uniformly won the title each year, each team is different. This year’s team, say the seniors, is extremely close-knit.
“We all are close in school and out of school,” said Haverdill. “And I think that also we’ve all stuck out these four years together and just always just been close. And I know for me, I’m really close with the underclassmen too. And I think that everyone’s different and all of our personalities clash together and it’s perfect.
“I feel like this team’s extra special.”
