HIGH ACHIEVERS: Edge Gymnastics’ Mackenzie Grant, Lauren Mooney 1 of 3 local pairs to earn Petro-Canada FACE funding

By Martin Cleary

Mackenzie Grant boarded an airplane earlier this week to fly to Paris for a return trip to the Tournoi International artistic gymnastics meet in Combs-la-Ville, a suburb of the French capital.

If she had the super-human power to fly there on her own, she likely would have accepted the challenge. Grant, 13, loves to fly through the air as she performs a variety of interesting and difficult technical elements.

“When I was four or five, I kept bugging my parents about going into gymnastics. I would fly off the couch. My sister (Cameron) was in gymnastics. I wanted to copy her. I loved the feeling of flying and pushing myself to do hard skills,” Grant said in a recent phone interview.

She recently was airborne again for a totally different reason, when she and her Edge Gymnastics coach Lauren Mooney were named one of 55 athlete-coach pairs to be named to the Fuelling Athlete and Coaching Excellence (F.A.C.E.) Program Class of 2025.

Grant and Mooney will share the $10,000 grant to fund training, travel, equipment and/or education.

The list of honoured pairs also included diver Ella Lindsay and Nepean Ottawa Diving Club coach Fernando Henderson and taekwondo’s Laila Khan and master coach George Koh.

The F.A.C.E program started 37 years ago to support athletes and coaches sharing the Olympic or Paralympic dream. Since 1988, Petro-Canada has given more than $14 million to more than 3,500 Canadian athletes and coaches.

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Lindsay, 15, collected gold, silver and bronze medals at the Junior Elite Canadian diving championships, earned a bronze at an international youth meet in Dresden, Germany, and won five gold medals at the Ontario Summer provincial championships this past season.

Khan, 17, competes in the women’s under-49-kilogram and under-52-kilogram classes in Olympic-style taekwondo sparring. She has won four Canadian championships, including the senior and junior titles this year.

On Thursday, she’ll compete in the 2025 World Taekwondo Championships in China. Koh is also at the competition as a Team Canada coach. On Tuesday, another of Koh’s Phoenix TKD products, Leonarda Andric, received a bye through the first round, won her first match and then lost in the round of 16 in the women’s 67 kg division.

Like Lindsay and Khan, Grant is excelling in her sport of artistic gymnastics, whether it’s the floor, the balance beam, the uneven bars or the vault.

After winning the 2024 Canadian girls’ high-performance novice all-around championship in Gatineau by a commanding margin with one first-place result and three second-place finishes, Grant moved up to the junior class this season, which was one year earlier than expected.

At the 2025 Canadian junior championships in Calgary, she was third in vault and fifth all-around. This result helped her qualify to represent Canada at the international youth meet in Combs-la-Ville for the second year in a row.

Competing in the last two Elite Canada competitions, Grant was third all-around in junior this year, which included a third-place result on balance beam, and fourth in novice in 2024.

Being selected to the F.A.C.E. program with Mooney will serve Grant well, especially when it comes to covering travel costs.

“I’m super grateful,” said Grant, a Carp resident and Grade 8 student at All Saints High School in Kanata. “I’m so excited to have this opportunity.

“Gymnastics is my love and passion. I’m always excited to come to the gym and train.”

Mooney shared that same feeling of joy with Grant about being recognized as an up-and-coming, high-performance pair by the Canadian Olympic Committee, the Canadian Paralympic Committee, the Coaching Association of Canada and Petro-Canada, which sponsors the F.A.C.E. program.

“It really means a lot to me,” she said in a recent phone interview. “I’m overall excited. I really appreciate what the grant stands for. It’s nice that it’s a coach-athlete pairing.

“There’s a lot of day-to-day communication (between coach and athlete). We spend more than 25 hours a week together and will travel a lot.”

That’s certainly the case right now as Grant and Mooney prepare for her second international youth meet in Combs-la-Ville on the weekend.

As a 12-year-old, Grant made her international debut in 2024 and it was an important learning experience. For the weeks leading up to the French meet, she continued upgrading her technical skills and difficulty.

Grant placed 35th out of 49 gymnasts in the Espoir class and was 11th in the two-person team event with Carlaya Millin. She hopes to have a higher standing on Sunday at the conclusion of the Tournoi International.

“I was very excited,” Grant said about her international debut. “I knew what to do and I pushed myself. I learned to push myself harder in different areas, work on my mental game and be more focused.

“This year, I’ll do a lot better and push myself harder.”

Mooney said her student didn’t have the consistency and experience of her new routines entering the meet.

“She’s a very good all-around athlete and definitely has the physical potential,” Mooney added. “She has a really good mental (approach). She’s like a stubborn seven-year-old. I like her stubbornness and I’m working to develop it.

“She picks up things quickly. I think she has the potential to be good on all four (apparatuses). She has all the attributes and is the full package.”

As Grant works through her first full year as a junior, one year earlier than scheduled, she continues to upgrade her vault, floor, beam and bars skills and inspire her clubmates.

“High-performance is very difficult and challenging,” Mooney explained. “There are a lot of great up-and-comers. She’s a good leader in the gym, knows how to train and has a good, positive attitude.”