The Brecksville Bees Gymnastics Team Is America's Greatest High School Sports Dynasty

It was August 2022, still months before the season started and five months after the last state title win. Brecksville-Broadview Heights assistant coach Leah Miko stood at Gym World at a club practice, wearing her usual coaching uniform: black workout pants and a T-shirt, with her long curly brown hair pulled back in a ponytail.

She watched her group of club gymnasts complete their warmup drills and tried to stop her mind from wandering. Two of the gymnasts in the club practice were Brecksville gymnasts, but the rest competed for other area schools — Padua, Strongsville, Magnificat and more. It was a weird reality of the Ohio gymnastics scene really. She was doing her best to coach the gymnasts at Gym World who could potentially upset her high school team — her alma mater and the thing that drove her to near madness daily — in the next state meet.

And while she was coaching the club gymnasts, often her mind kept wandering to that high school team. She had the same problem when she was driving to and from school or was at one of her other jobs — she also worked as a bartender — and mostly, it was the worst before she went to sleep at night. Leah couldn’t stop her mind from thinking about the hurdles facing the Brecksville-Broadview Heights team the next season.

The lack of depth and known talent on the upcoming season roster was the thing that haunted her when she was not rethinking her strategy and where it almost went wrong with the last team. It had been months, but she couldn’t get it out of her head.

She thought about how she was going to change her coaching style next season, as her team went for its 20th consecutive state title. She was going to see the incoming wave of tension or pressure at the start of the season and balance it out with upbeat positivity and calmness. That, she thought, was what went wrong at the last state meet, which ended in her in tears afraid that an 18-year consecutive state title streak was not going to go to 19.

“I’ve learned in my coaching career that every group of athletes is so different and this group cannot be serious,” she said. “If they’re serious about it, then they really fall apart. So they almost need to have this joking, more relaxed manner. And that was really hard for me as a coach because that’s not how I grew up. I was very serious. I was very type A — hey, we need to focus, we need to dial in. So that was an adjustment for me.”

The group of gymnasts had also dealt with something unprecedented — two years of COVID-19 that changed their lives and what the sport looked like. The 2021 meet, the year before, everyone who wasn’t competing watched from the hotel on a live feed instead of in the gym with their teammates. Gymnasts who were accustomed to their teammates standing on the sidelines and supporting them with cheers, encouragement, and just familiar faces, were instead greeted with the unfamiliar and unsupportive faces of masked officials. Their parents also watched from the lobby of the hotel, gathered around a single TV. It was the only way to keep the sport going.

So in 2022, Leah was trying mostly to remind them of what gymnastics was supposed to be. And why they all loved their high school team experience. But then when the pressure of the last event at the state meet came, Leah thought that’s when the mood was out of her control and there was nothing she could do to bring it back. It got too serious.

“I didn’t know how to coach that because I’ve been coaching them to be silly and be relaxed, but still have enough balance of focus. But they had a lot less pressure when they were silly. And I feel that they felt pressure because we had a goal of hitting 150 points as a team to break the state record. And we were on track to do that after the third event. A beam score that we’ve hit many times before.”

Later that night after the team portion of the state meet, when she was preparing the gymnasts for the individual meet the next day, Leah tried to put it in perspective. But she found that the maddening thing in the perspective was that sometimes, things that are supposed to be easy end up being hard. And out of your control. Figuring out how to coach out of that — that was what she had to conquer in the upcoming season.

“There’s some days where the cards just weren’t in our favor,” she had told her team as they sat at the hotel in Columbus that Friday night after the team portion of the state meet, “and, you know, that beam wasn’t in our favor.”

Even knowing that it was just a bad day on the beam and the team had actually ended up winning by a good margin, the other thing that kept her up at night was how she was going to avoid coaching mistakes this season.

A bad day on beam with three experienced seniors leading the pack wasn’t anything compared to the out-of-her-control factors heading into the team’s run at a twentieth consecutive title. When she was done thinking about the 2022 state meet, Leah often ticked through the freshmen coming through whom she knew from club gymnastics and tried to place them in lineups in her head.

She thought about the two seniors — Delaney Evans and Ella — and what kind of leaders they would be. She thought about junior Lea Haverdill coming back from an injury that had kept her sidelined for her sophomore year. She thought about the outgoing freshmen, Gianna (GG), Rachel Kelly, and Avery and if a year of experience at the state meet was going to make it easier enough next season to ignore the pressure. She wondered if incoming junior Jeanne Winzen’s back would be healthy enough for her to make an impact. She wondered what other teams were going to come back with as they tried to knock down the ever-defending champions.

Leah opened each season by giving a speech to the team. She talked about how it’s a team sport and they compete for their team. It’s not club gymnastics, where they’re competing for themselves.

She talked about how she doesn’t care if you fall off the beam, she cares about if you are cheering for your teammates as they compete after you. Her talk for the next season would include one more piece of advice. “We don’t have as much talent as we’ve had in years past,” she said. “We don’t have that star athlete. We don’t even have two mediocre athletes; we have a very young team with eight freshmen coming in.

“But hard work is something that we’ll all have.”

Standing at Gym World as she called out drills for her club practice, she went through the events of the mistakes made in the state meet and last season again. She would confidently reiterate her points about working hard and being a good team player. Inwardly, she didn’t know. She hoped hard work would be enough.

"A Fraction of a Point: A Gymnastics Dynasty on the Line" by Nina Mandell is out March 10 from Kent State University Press.

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