MARIA SCHNEIDER was not feeling well.
She had just been named head coach of the gymnastics team at a suburban Cleveland high school.
It was more than one team. Schneider was in charge of a team that had won state title after state title.
For the last 16 years, the Bees had won every championship. The coach who took over the reins had a lot of responsibility and was afraid that she would be the one to end it.
Her brother said that she felt the pressure.
The team will have the chance to make it 19 at the state championships in March of 2022. All of the gymnasts on the current team were born before that.
Schneider said it was mind-blowing that the streak was still going on.
According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, the previous record-holder in the sport was Madison High School in South Dakota, which had a 16-year state title run from 1995 to 2010. Washington's Bellingham Sehome won 13 consecutive state meets during the 70's and 80's.
The Bees have been so dominant in Ohio that they have not lost a single meet since 2004.
Four seniors, three of which have been to the state finals every year of their high school careers, are back for the season. They also want to continue the program's legacy.
"We never want to be the team that breaks the streak," said the assistant coach.
The program was built to help the gymnasts deal with the pressures of being a gymnast, as well as anything else that might come in the world of gymnastics or just being a teenager.
Schneider worked with her parents, Ron and Joan, for many years as an assistant and competed for the team. Gymnasts who have competed in the program say the focus on mental health and camaraderie of the team is what makes the streak possible. The weekly classroom session started decades before athletes spoke about their mental health.
We would talk about the psychological aspect of gymnastics and how it affects us, how it affects our life outside of gymnastics, how it affects our bodies, our self-awareness and everything.
When she is coaching her children in gymnastics, Prozy still channels her former coach, who she competed for at Brecksville-Broadview Heights.
I think gymnastics is 70% mental and 30% physical. Ron Ganim believed that. He taught you how to deal with a lot of things. Time management. Nutrition. How to deal with stress when you are taking tests is a topic that will be covered in this article. She said that he focused on the mental part of your being, not just gymnastics.
Ron and Joan met on a blind date. Both Joan and Ron played football. She was looking for a way to go to the dance when she agreed to the date.
He used to come to the gym every day to watch me and Rudy, and if you were going to become a gymnast, you would have to come here every day.
Joan and her husband joined as health teachers a year after they graduated from high school. They got varsity status for the first time for the girls team when they started coaching at the high school.
"We would talk about the psychological aspect of gymnastics and how it affects us, how it affects our life outside of gymnastics, how it affects our bodies, our self-awareness and everything." Kristy Thorp, Bees gymnast from 2002 to 2006
Joan says she was told by school officials that her teaching career was over after the birth of their second child.
Gymnastics World, one of the first gymnastics schools in the area, was started with the help of a bit of money from Joan's parents. Gymnastics World started with recreational programs for kids as young as 10 months and runs up through an elite club team where many of the Brecksville gymnasts train.
It is a key reason why the high school is so competitive despite not being able to recruit gymnasts like a private school could.
The high school thrives because Gym World is right there.
After 12 years after her parents left, Schneider decided she wanted to compete for the high school when the Ganims returned to coach in 1988.
Joan knew if she wanted to see her compete, she would have to be there.
Schneider followed in her mom's footsteps and joined the gymnastics team at Kent State. The first state championship for Brecksville was in 1994.
When she graduated from college, Schneider became a health teacher. The streak began in 2004, when Schneider was an assistant coach.
Alecia Farina scored the first perfect 10 in OHSAA history on vault in 2015, one of the most legendary performances of the past 18 years. She had a tattoo of Ron's name on her wrist because she was so close to the family.
The streak has looked like it could be in danger in the past.
Magnificat High School came within 0.35 of a point in 2008 and 0.125 in 2009.
The assistant coach competed for Brecksville from 2007 to 2010 and remembers both of those. She recalled that in 2008 after some ups and downs in the meet, the Bees were relying on a senior named Andrea Kinzer to do a move on the vault so difficult that she broke her ankle the year before.
We told her that we needed a 9.7 to win and the vault that she was doing was only a 9.7 so we told her to do a Yurchenko layout full. She got a 9.65 on the first vault, which is not good enough for a 9.7.
Kinzer earned a 9.955 on her second vault.
That was crazy, but I think the team would do anything to keep the streak going.
A trophy case at the front of the school is dedicated to the gymnastics teams and a wall in the gym is covered with state championship banners.
The line to pay respects to the family stretched for more than eight hours at his funeral.
Before her sophomore year of high school, Anna moved to Brecksville from Florida. She is the only one of the four seniors who has not spent her entire career with the team. She admitted the legend of the streak gave her a bit of self-doubt despite having competed in gymnastics for years.
She said that it was very scary coming into the environment.
The team made gingerbread houses last year as a way to build camaraderie and the seniors pointed to team bus rides and dinners as their favorite memories of high school gymnastics.
When it comes to pressure, Joan said she kept her advice simple: "Just have fun."
You cannot control it. You can only ask for the best job if you do it.
The journalist is from Cleveland. She was the managing editor of NBC Sports Washington and USA Today's For The Win.
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