Oluchi Okananwa wanted to be an Olympic gymnast. At Maryland, she’s an all-around basketball star.

The best thing that ever happened to Oluchi Okananwa’s basketball career was the worst thing that ever happened to her gymnastics career: She grew up.

Basketball is the Maryland junior’s true love. But gymnastics was her first love. And what makes Okananwa an All-America-level talent in one is also what ended her Olympic ambitions in the other.

On Wednesday, after the fifth-seeded Terps’ final practice in College Park ahead of their NCAA tournament opener Friday afternoon against No. 12 seed Murray State in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Okananwa recalled her final practice as a gymnast. Only a seventh grader, she knew she’d outgrown her dreams. The finality was crushing. She cried and cried.

“I need to stop,” Okananwa remembered realizing. “My height was already starting to become a problem.” She would grow to 5 feet, 10 inches tall — perfect for a guard, problematic for a gymnast.

Okananwa’s sporting heroes had once seemed larger than life. She’d gravitated to gymnastics from an early age, cartwheeling around her family’s living room in Peabody, Massachusetts. After Gabby Douglas won the all-around gold medal at the 2012 London Games, her visage was stamped on Corn Flakes boxes.

Around their home, Oluchi would look at the cereal “all the time,” said her mother, Patience, a potential future reflected back at her: a young, Black gymnast on top of the world.

“That’s going to be me,” Oluchi recalled thinking. “I’m going to compete professionally.”

The dream persisted for years. Oluchi was enrolled in lessons around age 4 and took to the sport quickly. She was among the best gymnasts her age in the North Shore region of Massachusetts, Patience recalled, winning meets and soaring ever higher as she honed her preternatural balance and explosiveness.

When Oluchi was about 9, she started training with a coach in nearby Newburyport who’d worked with Olympic gymnasts. About a year or two later, she joined the Yellow Jackets Gymnastics program in nearby Danvers, owned by Peter Kormann, a former Olympic gymnast and former head coach of the U.S. men’s team.

“Her dream was to go to the Olympics,” Patience said. “She wanted to be an Olympian in gymnastics.”

Basketball was only a passing interest. Oluchi loved nothing more than competing in the floor exercise. The mat became her canvas. “It felt like I was flying,” she said. “It was just open.”

But the sport was closing in around her. Okananwa, always tall for her age — her father, Anthony, is 6-2 — had never considered the small margins that gymnastics affords its biggest competitors. Growing up, she’d done everything: floor, vault, balance beam, uneven bars.

Then, one day, Okananwa was practicing on the uneven bars, the apparatus on which Douglas had earned her “Flying Squirrel” nickname. In international competition, the high bar is set 8.2 feet high and the low bar at 5.6 feet. Okananwa’d had a growth spurt recently, and she could not swing her legs without hitting the lower bar. On the balance beam, she could not do a back handspring without landing near the end of the 15.4-foot-long apparatus.

Okananwa was running out of space, out of time. Douglas was only 5-2. Okananwa was a head taller and still growing.

“I’m about to go into a meet and, like, embarrass myself,” she remembered thinking. She joked about the whispers she might hear around the gym: “What is this tall girl doing?”

Patience, a Nigerian immigrant who was working tirelessly to support their growing family of six, sat with Oluchi one day for a pointed conversation. She wanted to know the same thing: “What are we doing?” Committing to gymnastics meant committing significant time and money. Committing to gymnastics meant “living in fairy-tale land,” Oluchi said. She’d been eagerly awaiting the debut of her first choreographed floor routine, but meet-winning scores elsewhere no longer seemed possible. Competing had started to feel “awkward.”

There was no future in the sport for Oluchi, and she knew it.

“The only thing that stopped Oluchi from gymnastics,” Patience said, “was her height.”

Two years later, Oluchi’s older brothers, Chieme and Ugonna, urged Patience to come watch her play basketball. Oluchi, who’d played recreationally since elementary school, had made the varsity team at Peabody High School as a freshman.

Sitting in the stands, Patience could barely recognize the force before her. “I sat and I thought, ‘Is this my daughter?’” Her voice quavered. “Oh, my God.”

Oluchi averaged 16.7 points, 7.6 rebounds and 7.2 steals per game as she led Peabody to a 26-2 record and an appearance in the Division I North semifinals. Recruiting interest exploded as her game developed. Unranked for much of high school, Oluchi headed to Duke as the No. 27 overall prospect in the class of 2023.

After two promising seasons under coach Kara Lawson, including a run to the 2025 Atlantic Coast Conference tournament title that earned her Most Outstanding Player honors, Okananwa entered the transfer portal last spring. She committed to Maryland in April, lured by coach Brenda Frese’s track record of talent development and the Terps’ up-tempo pace.

Few transfers have stuck the landing better. Okananwa leads an injury-depleted Maryland team in points (18 per game) and steals (2.3 per game) and is third among regular contributors in rebounds (5.5 per game) and assists (2.1 per game).

A pesky full-court defender and relentless rebounder, Okananwa was, by one metric, the seventh-most valuable player in Big Ten Conference play this season, not far behind a pair of All-Americans, Michigan guard Olivia Olson and UCLA center Lauren Betts.

“She’s very, very talented,” guard Saylor Poffenbarger, a Middletown High School graduate, said Wednesday of Okananwa, an All-America honorable mention. “She can put the ball in the basket whenever you want. She can go by anyone. Her first step is insane. Just having that on our side, we’re obviously very blessed. I would not want to play against Oluchi.”

Okananwa’s gymnastics background is obvious on the court. Frese pointed to her defensive stance, how she’s rarely left off-balance.

But it’s on offense where she most channels the “Flying Squirrel” within. On fast breaks, Okananwa often charges downcourt as if sprinting toward a vaulting table, undeterred by the odds of a one-on-four matchup. In the paint, she pivots and pirouettes around towering centers, inventing angles to the basket, no longer burdened by the unforgiving dimensions of a 4-inch-wide balance beam.

On Wednesday, Okananwa grinned as she recalled a shot she’d missed against Ohio State. In the third quarter of the January loss, she’d spun by her primary defender and jump-stepped beyond the reach of the taller secondary defender. Then, with her head passing underneath the basket, she attempted a reverse layup, her body briefly contorting into a “J” shape as she tried to keep herself from tumbling out of bounds.

The ball danced around the rim before bouncing out. Okananwa still treasures the moment. She has a photo of the aerial acrobatics on her phone, a snapshot of her past and a vision of her future.

“It definitely was my first sport where I can use my fieriness to my advantage,” Okananwa said of gymnastics. “I didn’t have to contain myself. Granted, you do have to have poise and control, you know what I mean? But that power was still wanted, and that fierceness was still needed, and that diva inside you — it’s definitely stayed with me throughout.

“Of course, in basketball, it’s only gotten more evident.”