Foreign exchange student makes impact on state championship gymnastics team

Owatonna has a long and storied history in gymnastics, but if you did not know anything about it before this season, you weren’t the only one.

Léa, a foreign exchange student from Belgium, joined the gymnastics team this year after having little competition experience in the sport and not knowing the program even existed. Little did she know she’d be part of a team winning its first state team championship in program history.

Foreign exchange program

Before moving to the United States at the start of the 2024-25 school year, Léa lived in Belgium all her life. She decided to engage in the Rotary Youth Exchange program, part of Rotary International.

“I found out that there are different programs that allow people to study abroad, and so I signed up for one of the programs,” Léa said.

She had the option to go to five different countries and ended up deciding between the United States, Canada, and Argentina. She was the one of the first people to sign up for the program and to complete the papers for it, so she was able to choose her first choice: the states.

While Léa is a junior at the Owatonna Senior High School, she is the same age as the seniors and she graduated in Belgium last year. Owatonna has class requirements for seniors for getting into colleges that Léa did not have to partake in.

The transition to the United States went pretty smooth for Léa, as she spoke fluent English due to her having English-speaking classes for the last four years in Belgium. But the transition had some negative aspects to it, mostly coming from homesickness.

“It was pretty easy,” Léa said about the transition. “The only part was that I missed my family a lot and I didn’t expect that because I was so excited to come that I didn’t realize it was for a year and not for like three months.”

What made it easy for Léa to cope with the homesickness was her three host families. They supported her and she still spent a lot of time talking with her family via phone calls and texting.

“We still text each other pretty often, that’s how I deal with it,” Léa said about being home sick.

Return to gymnastics

After participating in cross country in the fall for Owatonna, Léa decided to try gymnastics this winter sports season.

“I did gymnastics when I was younger, until I was 8, and I’ve been doing acrobatic gymnastics, which is not the same at all, for the past four years,” she said. “I wanted to do gymnastics, because I knew the sport, and I just thought it would be fun to join the team.”

“This is her first skid around,” Owatonna head coach Evan Moe said about Léa. “It sounded like she had maybe done a little bit of gymnastics way back, but nothing at competition level or anything like that.”

Léa first became knowledgeable about the school’s gymnastics program from Owatonna senior captain Jozie Johnson, as the two were in the same psychology class.

“Thanks to her, I joined the team, because she answered all my questions,” said Léa. “She sent me all the information and everything.”

Léa had the opportunity to join the cheer team at Owatonna, but did not due to the program having tryouts for the fall season in the spring. She was offered to try out for the winter season but declined due to her wanting to try gymnastics.

So she ended up on the gymnastics team, and the Huskies welcomed her with open arms.

“They were so welcoming. They came to me, and they were like, ‘It’s nice to meet you,’” she said. “They were so welcoming, and I love them so much, because I didn’t feel like I was an exchange student that only came for a year. I really felt like part of the team.”

“She came in and wasn’t really sure how much she’d be able to do, but we just embraced how we coached, which is to make sure that they are able to succeed no matter what,” Moe said. “She practiced every day with us, hung out with us, competed for us in multiple events, and did a great job all year long.”

Léa tried all of the four events in the sport when she first joined the team, and ended up competing in vault and floor. She practiced throughout the year on the beam but did not compete in the event. She tried doing bars, but she found out that it wasn’t something she was interested in doing.

“I practiced a few times and then I was like ‘Nope, that’s not for me,’” Léa said about the bars.

When asked what her favorite event in the sport was, she said it was floor, but the vault is easier to do than a floor routine.

“It’s really difficult,” Moe said about joining the sport with having little or no prior experience. “There’s things where you’ve got to kind of settle on not being able to do maybe after you tried and then other things that you can really push through and get, especially in a short amount of time. With only having three months, we really had to make sure that we had her up and running and ready to go to do the routines that she can do.”

State champions

While she did not compete at the Class AA state championship meet on Friday, Feb. 21, she was with the team throughout the whole night supporting them.

Since Owatonna’s coaches do not tell their gymnasts the team scores throughout meets and in-between events, the team did not know how close they were with the other teams in the competition.

Léa noted that it’s better for the gymnasts to not know the scores because if the team is too close in the team scores with another team for first place, they might try to do more to get a higher score and overthink it.

“I Feel like not knowing the scores gives us the opportunity to do our best every time,” she said.

While the team had an idea that they won state due to the parents being excited after the balance beam event, which was the Huskies’ last event of the meet, they still didn’t know for sure once the place winners were announced.

Along with the other seven teams that competed at the state competition, the Huskies sat on the floor inside the Roy Wilkins Auditorium and waited for the winner to be announced. Once the New Prague Trojans were announced as the second-place finisher, Léa’s face lit up as she realized that the Huskies won the state title for sure.

“I didn’t realize that we were state champions,” Léa said about what was going through her mind when she was sitting in a circle with her teammates on the mat. “That was crazy because during the meet we didn’t know how close we were but I saw [New Prague] doing their event I was like ‘woah, that is going to be complicated’ but then after beam, when I saw the parents being so excited and I saw some of the moms crying I was like ‘wait, did we actually do it?’”

They indeed did as they won the first state team title in school history.

“I’m just so proud of them because I see them practicing everyday,” Léa said about her team. “It’s just amazing to see this accomplishment of all the work they did this year.”

When asked what she will remember most about her time on the Owatonna gymnastics team this year, Léa said the team because it was more than just a team to her.

“I mean we see each other every day for three hours and so it really became a family for me and they were so nice and so welcoming,” she said about the Huskies.

Something new

After her time at Owatonna, Léa is planning on going to college in the Netherlands, where she will major in Psychology.

Before returning to Europe, she is set to partake in her third sport at Owatonna in the spring. She will play on the softball team, which is a sport that she has no experience in.

“We don’t have that sport in Belgium, so it will be new for me but I’m excited to try it,” she said.

While Léa was new to cross country when she competed in the fall for the Huskies, she competed in track and field in Belgium and had experience in running. With her having little experience in gymnastics before joining the eventual state-champion team, softball will be an entirely new experience for her.

“My mom told me that I should try a new sport said. “When I was home I did track, so cross country was kind of the same and I did gymnastics when I was younger so I knew about it too. Softball was totally knew for me so I was like ‘okay let’s try something new, that’s why I’m here so let’s do it.’”