Entering the 2026 season, Ana Lorenzo wanted to challenge her gymnasts at Walter Johnson High School in North Bethesda, Maryland, to get out of their comfort zone.
The 30-year-old coach wanted her gymnasts to encourage each other to try their hardest in practice and to give each other feedback when trying new routines and moves.
“I’ve instilled in their mind that it’s OK to fail because you’re trying your hardest at that moment in time,” Lorenzo said. “I’m not going to pin it against you.”
That tactic proved to be crucial as the Wildcats finished the season undefeated, besting six other teams to capture the Montgomery County Championship on Tuesday night.
“I’ve never felt such a team effort as I have this season, to really help everyone become the best gymnasts that they can be,” captain Shoshana Berger told WTOP.
The title win made Walter Johnson the final gymnastics champion in Montgomery County. Earlier this year, the Maryland jurisdiction announced it would no longer offer gymnastics as an interscholastic sport.
Before the start of the season, the school system’s decision to end gymnastics weighed on some of the gymnasts.
Sophomore Siena Schaner spoke out against the decision , calling the decision to replace the sport with STUNT, a new sport derived from traditional cheerleading, “entirely inadequate.”
Berger said she and others were motivated to perform to “make the county almost feel bad about their decision and how wrong it feels to us.”
Meanwhile, during practices, Lorenzo kept her focus on challenging her gymnasts while calling on them to help one another. She credited watching Walter Johnson alum Kimmi Shiau compete at the collegiate level for Rutgers against Maryland before the start of the season.
“Seeing their sportsmanship, I said to the girls, ‘This is how we’re going to be acting when it’s our turn,'” Lorenzo said.
Her challenging coaching style motivated Berger to work on the vault, with varying degrees of success, the senior said.
“It’s going to be really hard to let go of her as a coach, because she’s just so amazing and so supportive,” Berger said. “I really don’t think that our team would have made it anywhere close to where we did this season if it weren’t for her and her coaching style.”
Going out on top
The Wildcats showed their growth earlier, defeating Walt Whitman, a program that hadn’t lost in over three years. Berger called it a “switching point” of the season, helping her and her teammates realize that they could be on tap for a strong season.
After winning their remaining four meets, Walter Johnson entered the county championships feeling confident. In the first event, senior Lina Su, who missed last season with a torn ACL, scored a 9.55 after landing a back handspring on the beam.
Lorenzo recalled getting emotional watching Su go from being unable to perform a year ago to completing the beam move.
“Every time she (attempted) it, she would fall, and this is the one meet where she landed it,” Lorenzo said. “When the moment she landed it, I was just so proud of her that 鈥� I could not stop crying.”
Su’s score set the tone for the rest of the evening as Wildcat gymnasts received their best scores of the season during the championships. For Lorenzo, the real victory was while they supported each other.
“Winning the county championship was the cherry on top,” Lorenzo said.
Capturing the county championships was bittersweet for Berger, who plans to stop competing in gymnastics after high school. She is going to miss spending time with her fellow gymnasts at practices, even taking in and out the mats, and the community they built around the sport.
However, she is happy to end her time in gymnastics as a champion.
“It’s something that I’ll carry on forever, knowing that the last ever time that I competed and anybody else in Montgomery County competed was the time that Walter Johnson took the title,” Berger said.
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