# Lillianna DiBerardinis: Land O’ Lakes Gymnast Finds Her Footing in the Acrobatics Arena at Saint Leo
There is a certain kind of athlete who does not stop when one chapter ends — who takes the skills, the discipline, and the competitive fire built across years of one sport and channels them directly into something new. Lillianna DiBerardinis is that kind of athlete. A Level 9 competitive gymnast and varsity cheer captain from the Tampa Bay area, she arrived at Saint Leo University in the fall of 2024 with a résumé earned across two demanding disciplines and a willingness to start learning something harder than either of them. A year-and-a-half into her collegiate acrobatics and tumbling career, she is exactly where she set out to be: inside a program that is pushing her to grow, surrounded by teammates who feel like family.
## Roots in Land O’ Lakes
DiBerardinis grew up in Land O’ Lakes, Florida, a fast-growing community in Pasco County just north of Tampa. She is the daughter of Jeff and Kerri DiBerardinis, and has a brother named Drew. Land O’ Lakes is a community that sits in the orbit of Tampa’s broad sports culture — close enough to Amalie Arena for Lightning hockey to be part of the family’s identity, and home to a sprawling network of youth athletic programs that run the range from recreational to nationally competitive. For Lillianna, that world of competitive youth athletics began early, and it began in gymnastics.
She trained at two of the Tampa Bay region’s well-regarded gymnastics clubs — DGA Tampa and Tampa Bay Turners — under coaches Jill Boasak, Jesse Rappaport, and Brad Harris. Tampa Bay Turners, based in St. Petersburg, is a recognized force in Florida club gymnastics, with an established pipeline to the college level and a reputation for producing athletes who arrive at the next stage technically prepared and mentally tough. DGA Tampa rounds out the dual-club background that shaped DiBerardinis across her most formative competitive years.
## The Gymnastics Career: A Level 9 Journey
USA Gymnastics’ Junior Olympic program is organized into ten levels, with Level 10 representing the top tier of the club system below elite. Reaching Level 9 is a legitimate accomplishment — it requires mastering a set of skills in vault, bars, beam, and floor that most recreational gymnasts will never approach, and it places an athlete within the upper tier of club competitors in Florida’s competitive region.
DiBerardinis reached that level and competed at it, earning a record that includes some of the strongest honors available in the Junior Olympic system. Her Instagram bio, which she has used to document her gymnastics career, tells part of the story concisely: she was the 2018 All-Around and Vault State Champion and the 2019 Region 8 Bar Champion. Those two lines represent years of foundational work. The all-around title means she was the top-scoring gymnast across all four events at Florida’s state championships in her level and age group — not a specialist’s honor, but a complete gymnast’s honor. The vault state title in the same year underlines that her power and explosiveness, skills that translate directly to the throwing events and tumbling passes in acrobatics and tumbling, were among her defining strengths.
The Region 8 Bar Championship the following year added another dimension. The uneven bars demand a very different athletic profile from vault — it requires precise timing, grip strength, body tension, and swing mechanics — and winning at the regional level means competing successfully against the best athletes from multiple states. Separately, DiBerardinis qualified to the regional championships at Levels 6, 7, and 8 on her way up, a consistent upward progression that reflects the kind of steady development rather than one-time peak performance.
Her program bio notes that she won both an all-around title and a state championship — and the state bar championship is referenced separately — so the total picture of her gymnastics career includes multiple championship-level results across different events and different years.
## Cheerleading and Leadership at Land O’ Lakes High
Alongside her club gymnastics career, DiBerardinis competed as a cheerleader at Land O’ Lakes High School, where she worked under Coach Amber Linden. Land O’ Lakes High is a member of the Sunshine Athletic Conference East in Pasco County, one of Florida’s more competitive prep athletic conferences. The school’s cheer program competes at a serious level within the conference, and DiBerardinis made her mark on it.
She earned both a First Team and Second Team Sunshine Athletic Conference Award across her high school career — a reflection of how her performance was evaluated at the conference level across multiple seasons. More notably, she was named Varsity Captain, a role that says as much about character and leadership as it does about technical ability. Captaining a cheer program, particularly one competing at a meaningful conference level, means organizing teammates, setting the tone in practice, and being the person others look to when the pressure is on. That DiBerardinis was selected for that role at Land O’ Lakes speaks to something her coaches and teammates recognized in her beyond what showed up on the mat.
She graduated with the class of 2024.
## Choosing Saint Leo
When it came time to recruit, DiBerardinis could have pursued competitive cheerleading at the collegiate level, or looked for a gymnastics-adjacent path. Instead, she chose something that would challenge her in a new way. Acrobatics and tumbling, the collegiate sport governed by the National Collegiate Acrobatics & Tumbling Association (NCATA), draws heavily from both gymnastics and cheerleading — its six scoring events include compulsory skills, acrobatic pyramids, toss elements, tumbling passes, and a full team routine — but it is its own discipline, with its own technical demands and its own culture.
Saint Leo University, located in Saint Leo, Florida — a small community in Pasco County, directly southeast of Land O’ Lakes — offered something specific: a program that had been visibly improving under head coach Britteny Johnson, who joined the Lions in June 2023, and a team culture that made a real impression on DiBerardinis when she visited. “She knew the team was going to push her to become a better athlete, and the tight knitted team bond made her feel welcomed,” her official program bio notes, and those were the factors that settled the decision.
It also helped that the Lions were on the rise. Coach Johnson, who had previously built a program from scratch at Coker University and competed at the national level herself at Glenville State, had taken over a Saint Leo program that finished 4-2 in 2023. Her first season at the helm in 2024 produced a 6-2 record, the program’s best season ever at the time, capped by the first-ever perfect 10.0 score in program history. By the time DiBerardinis was committing for the fall of 2024, Saint Leo had earned its first-ever preseason ranking in the NCATA coaches poll. She was joining something that was clearly building toward something.
## Freshman Season (2024–25): The Learning Curve
Acrobatics and tumbling is not simply gymnastics or cheerleading with a new name — it is a sport that requires learning specific partnership mechanics, trust between base and top athletes, and the kind of synchronized execution that can only come from extended time on the mat together. For a first-year athlete arriving from a strong gymnastics background, the physical tools are there, but the sport-specific application takes time and repetition.
DiBerardinis’ freshman season (2024–25) was her entry point into that process. Listed at 5 feet 1 inch and wearing number 3, she competes as a base and tumbler — a demanding positional combination that requires both the strength and stability to support and throw other athletes, and the tumbling skill set to contribute independently in the pass-based events. Her program bio notes simply that she was “first year member of the team” in 2024–25, consistent with how most acrobatics programs characterize freshmen who are developing their partnership roles and building competition experience.
The team around her was having a historic year. The 2025 season saw the Lions post a 6-2 overall record, reach the program’s highest-ever national ranking of No. 10 in the NCATA standings, earn signature wins over Presbyterian and Montevallo, and compete toe to toe with nationally ranked programs throughout the spring. At the NCATA Event Finals in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, graduate student Abbie Baker was named the NCATA Division II Specialist of the Year — the first national individual award in program history. DiBerardinis was part of a team in the middle of its breakthrough season, and the experience of being in that environment during a freshman year is exactly the kind of foundation that accelerates development.
## Sophomore Season (2025–26): Returning with Experience
Entering her sophomore year, DiBerardinis was listed as a Marketing major — a degree path that reflects the same dual-track ambition she has demonstrated throughout her athletic career. On the roster she remained number 3, base and tumbler, now with a full season of collegiate competition behind her.
The 2026 campaign got underway in February with Saint Leo ranked 11th in the NCATA preseason coaches poll. The Lions opened at home against top-ranked Baylor University, the nine-time national champions, in what is as difficult an opener as any program in the country faces. Baylor won 277.415 to 256.590, but the fact that a program the size of Saint Leo is opening its season against the Baylor Bears at all reflects the level at which the Lions are now operating.
From there, the team went on a six-meet winning streak that carried through the regular season. The Lions defeated West Liberty, Lander, Presbyterian twice — including a road sweep — and Converse in the regular-season finale. The six straight wins to close the regular season brought Saint Leo’s 2026 record to 6-1, and the team climbed to as high as 8th in the NCATA national rankings heading into the postseason — the top 8 programs in the final rankings qualify for the NCATA National Championships, being held in Azusa, California at Azusa Pacific University’s Felix Events Center from April 23–26, 2026. The four-team, single-elimination format of the championship means every match is a high-stakes competition with a season on the line.
For DiBerardinis, the 2026 run has meant competing as a returning contributor in a program with real national championship aspirations — not just appearances, but genuine top-8 credentials. That is a different experience than any freshman season could provide.
## Favorite Athletes and What They Represent
There is something telling about the role models Lillianna DiBerardinis has named publicly as her favorites: Jordan Chiles, Laurie Hernandez, and Aly Raisman. All three are decorated USA Olympic gymnasts. Chiles is a current national team member who earned medals at the Paris Olympics. Hernandez won team gold and floor silver at the 2016 Rio Games at just 16 years old. Raisman is a two-time Olympian, three-time gold medalist, and one of the most respected leaders in the recent history of American gymnastics.
What the three share — beyond their credentials — is a combination of physical excellence and visible character: the willingness to compete under pressure, to support teammates, and to carry themselves with a certain kind of professional dignity in the sport. That DiBerardinis points to athletes defined by those qualities rather than by purely individual accolades says something about what she values in competition.
Her sports teams of choice follow a similarly local and personal logic: the New York Giants, the New York Yankees, and the Tampa Bay Lightning. The Lightning connection is natural for a Tampa Bay-area athlete who grew up during the franchise’s championship runs, while the New York affiliations suggest family roots or allegiances that predate her Florida upbringing.
## Social Media and Public Presence
DiBerardinis maintains an active presence across social platforms that reflects both her athletic life and her personal interests. On Instagram at **@lillianna_diberardinis_2024**, she has documented her gymnastics career — the bio on the account calls out her Level 9 status, her 2018 state championships, and her 2019 regional bar title — alongside content from her collegiate acrobatics and tumbling experience at Saint Leo. The account, with approximately 690 followers, functions partly as an athletic archive and partly as a window into her day-to-day life as a student-athlete.
On TikTok, where she goes by **@lil_lifts**, DiBerardinis shares content centered on fitness, strength training, and the athlete lifestyle — including nutrition content, workout clips, and day-in-the-life looks at what it means to be a college acrobatics and tumbling athlete. Saint Leo’s own TikTok content has featured her in a “day in the life” format identifying her explicitly as a sophomore marketing major, giving fans of the program a look at her world beyond competition. She is also findable on LinkedIn under her full name, where her work at Angel’s Gymnastics is listed among her experience — likely reflecting coaching or instructor work in the gymnastics community, consistent with many former gymnasts who teach the sport while continuing to compete.
The team’s official accounts — **@SaintLeoAcro** on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) — offer additional content from the program’s perspective, including meet coverage, practice highlights, and athlete features.
As of this writing, no individual NIL sponsorship arrangements have been publicly announced for DiBerardinis, though Saint Leo University maintains an NIL policy that permits student-athletes to pursue individual deals in accordance with NCAA guidelines.
## What’s Next
Heading into the 2026 NCATA National Championships, Lillianna DiBerardinis is part of a program that has earned its spot at the table. Saint Leo has gone from a program posting its first-ever preseason ranking two years ago to one with legitimate top-8 national credentials — and the journey from freshman to sophomore has taken her from learning the sport in a high-pressure environment to being a returning piece of a team with championship expectations.
She came to Saint Leo wanting to be pushed toward growth and to feel the kind of team connection that makes the hard work feel worth it. Both of those things appear to have materialized. Her career goal, as stated in her program bio, was to get a better grasp of the sport and thrive in a new environment. That process is well underway — and for a 21-year-old athlete still in the early chapters of her college career, it is a foundation rather than a finished story.
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*Lillianna DiBerardinis competes as number 3 for the Saint Leo University Lions Acrobatics & Tumbling program. She can be followed on Instagram at @lillianna_diberardinis_2024 and on TikTok at @lil_lifts. Saint Leo Acrobatics & Tumbling can be followed on Instagram and X at @SaintLeoAcro.*
