Participating in jujitsu the past few years, Presentado realized how her skills could transfer to the mat. She practiced with the Cadets most of the preseason before school administrators told her she couldn’t compete — a situation that caused friction at the school when the team’s coach pressed the issue on her behalf.

“It made me pretty sad for a while,” said Presentado, who wanted to remain anonymous last year and is now telling her story. “But it also made me focus more on martial arts. … Overall, it made me a harder worker.”

Now a sophomore and still at St. John’s, Presentado remains driven, even if she has shelved her hopes to wrestle. She is one of just two jujitsu students at Ascend Institute of Martial Arts in Bethesda who have become coaches. She participates in numerous clubs at school and challenges herself with a rigorous academic schedule.

On a typical day, she wakes up at around 5 a.m., does her makeup, puts on athletic clothes and walks to a gym near her house, where she works out for about an hour before school.

Right after her school day ends, she’ll do some homework before heading to Bethesda to help her jujitsu coach set up the several practices she’ll help instruct. Once she gets home, around 8:30 p.m., she often eats a frozen meal or picks up food before confronting the rest of her homework.

“I live like a college kid,” Presentado says.

She has been using bits of spare time to prepare for the SAT and ACT. She is teaching herself physics and other classes she won’t take until later in high school.

While martial arts takes up at least four of her afternoons every week, Presentado has also begun to work, spending the better part of her weekends as a hostess and waitress at Steak N Egg Diner. She also has a gig at her gym and babysits.

“I hate having free time,” Presentado says.

Before Presentado started at St. John’s in 2021, she noticed similarities in the intricacies of wrestling and jujitsu. One starts a jujitsu match in a position similar to a wrestling stance, and much of the scoring is comparable, such as the concept of a takedown.

She practiced with coach Michael Sprague’s wrestling program for nearly the entire preseason, frequently attending lifts and workouts with the rest of the grapplers. Then, on a Friday afternoon that November, she was unexpectedly called out of her final-period class.

It was the day before the official start of wrestling season. Dennis Hart, the St. John’s athletic director, and Presentado’s guidance counselor pulled out a copy of the team’s roster, which had her name on it. They said there had been a major miscommunication and said she should have been told weeks earlier she wouldn’t be allowed to wrestle.

Wrestling for a Washington Catholic Athletic Conference team seemed like the perfect infusion of Presentado’s passion for contact sports and her desire to be a part of a team. But the school would not allow a girl to wrestle. Part of the reason, it said in a statement Hart emailed to The Washington Post last school year, was that “changing a single gender team to a coed team has potential implications not just for that particular team, but for other teams as well.”

Sprague wrote a letter and met with school administrators to advocate for Presentado.

The Cadets wrestlers also set up a meeting with Hart, where they asked the athletic director questions: How many girls would it take to make a separate girls’ team? What’s the problem with a boy wrestling a girl?

The school would not reverse course. Presentado noted administrators were particularly respectful and understanding in the way they broke the news to her, and she remains close with her guidance counselor. But it took her time to grasp the situation.

“It was so random, and it was so odd,” Presentado said. “Absolutely nobody on the team, including my coaches, had mentioned anything about there even being a concern for it. … It was such a shock, especially since it was the day before the season.”

Said Uriel Casas, her jujitsu coach, who had encouraged her interest in wrestling: “It just ripped me apart. I thought it was wrong. It was heartbreaking. I have watched her grow through this and I know she’s going to be stronger for it. But you still deserve to have those experiences.”

Sprague, a Georgetown Prep and American University alumnus, resigned as the Cadets’ coach last year, telling The Post at the time: “I told the AD that if the rule didn’t change, this was going to be my last year coaching. It’s against my core values.” The 26-year-old now lives in San Diego and works for a consulting company.

St. John’s, a wrestling program that won a D.C. title in 2020 and a WCAC championship in 2019, has dipped in performance. Its roster this past winter consisted of fewer than a dozen wrestlers, forcing the team to forfeit weight classes in nearly every dual meet.

Led by Matt Keel, a longtime coach in the area, the Cadets were an afterthought within the WCAC this past season. They placed eighth out of 10 teams at the Feb. 4 championships in Olney, finishing more than 200 points shy of champion St. Mary’s Ryken.

In March, Hart indicated in an email to The Post that the school’s policies have remained and there are no plans for a girls’ wrestling team in the near future. “Since the 2022 wrestling season ended, no female students raised the issue of creating a girl’s wrestling program or a coed wrestling program,” he wrote.

A growing love for jujitsu

A half-hour before a group of 19 students will walk into a basement in Bethesda, Presentado pulls a crash mat onto the floor and sits next to a 3-year-old boy whose family had expressed interest in jujitsu. While the prospective student’s mother speaks with Casas, Presentado and the boy crawl up and down the mat on their hands and feet as she takes him through several exercises.

Soon, Presentado puts on a royal blue robe, tied with a bright orange belt, and stands in front of a group of students. She runs practice alongside Alejandro Lopez, a former Quince Orchard wrestling captain who graduated from the University of Maryland last year. One of their students, 7-year-old Stella Sudre, wears a gray belt — the first belt jujitsu athletes wear — that’s a bit big on her.

There’s a tradition in jujitsu where athletes hand down their belts once they graduate to a new level, and Presentado chose to give her first belt to Sudre. Her family lives near Presentado and goes to Steak N Egg for breakfast every Sunday morning, where Sudre often climbs onto the booth to stand up and waves to Presentado while she’s working.

“Lots of people have offered to give me a smaller belt, but I’ve never agreed,” Sudre said. “I’m best friends with Victoria and would never give up the chance to wear her belt.”

Growing up, Presentado’s family didn’t initially push her toward sports. She was into the arts during her time at Deal Middle School, where she loved drawing and sang in the choir. Until the end of eighth grade, she was planning on attending Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Northwest Washington.

But her experience at Deal wasn’t entirely pleasant.

Presentado was bullied in sixth grade, and her father encouraged her to take up jujitsu to learn self-defense. She wasn’t a big fan at first, but her tone changed once she started attending practices with just two other students in 2020. Essentially having private lessons four times a week made her particularly good at jujitsu, and she fell in love with it.

“My coach says that I had natural athleticism when I started, and that was nice, but I don’t think I had ever taken sports seriously before,” Presentado said. “I realized that I love contact sports. I love wrestling. I love martial arts. … It made me feel like I was in control.”

At one point in practice, Presentado lifts her opponent and sweeps her. A 12-year-old named Harrison Stell happens to be watching as he waits to be picked up from his practice. The next day, he uses the move on his opponent, and it works.

Presentado has aspirations of going to medical school and becoming a doctor. But she says her biggest joy comes from teaching these classes, and Casas says “she’s made this place so much better,” because she brings out the best in others.

As she has spent more time at the jujitsu gym, Presentado has been heartened to see more and more girls follow her into the sport.

“I really, really look up to her,” said Isabella Hoffman, 12, who also wrestles and has learned a lot about the sport from Presentado. “She makes me feel like I am capable of anything that a boy can do.”