Splashing into the winter season

Sporl reflects on experience with diving team

By Kailey Bergstedt | Photos & Graphics Editor

Senior Maddy Grace Sporl takes a deep breath, stretches her arms above her head, takes a few quick steps forward and leaps off the diving board.

In her second year on the team, Sporl is one of the varsity diving captains.

“I decided to join last year because I realized diving was the best of both worlds for me,” Sporl said. “It combines my love for flipping and swimming into one sport.”

The diving team practices at Jesuit’s natatorium three times a week and conditions after school in Hockaday’s weight room the other two days.

“Diving definitely challenges you mentally, but is a really fun experience,” Sporl said.

Most of the team’s meets also occur at Jesuit. Last year, all of the competitions were intrasquad meets due to a lack of other girls’ diving teams to compete against. This year, the team plans to have some events with Parish Episcopal School to allow them to compete against people other than their teammates.

“I am super excited to be able to compete against people other than the other divers on our team this year because we really only had that opportunity once when we went to SPC last year,” Sporl said.

Everyone on the team participates in every meet and their scores are added together to determine if the team qualifies at SPC. At each meet, every diver will complete six dives, which are scored on a ten point scale. At the SPC meet however, each diver completes 11 dives. Judges take into consideration both the difficulty level of the dive and the diver’s execution of it. All six scores are multiplied by their degree of difficulty and then added together to create the diver’s final score from the meet.

“We set a team goal for everyone on the team to be able to do all six of their dives by the end of this season,” sophomore Alice Smith said. “The six dives are a front, backward, inward, reverse, twisting and one additional dive from any category.”

Front and back dives are just like they sound — divers will start either facing or turned away from the pool and enter the water facing the same way they started. To do an inward dive, a diver will start by jumping backward off the diving board but rotating forward during the dive. A reverse dive is the opposite. In a reverse dive, the diver will start facing forward but rotate backward before hitting the water. Finally, any dive that involves both twisting and flipping at the same time is considered a twist dive.

“The reverse dive is probably the hardest to do because divers need to learn to jump forward while diving backward,” Sierra Thain, varsity diving coach, said.

This is Thain’s second year coaching the diving team. She also coaches both Jesuit and Cistercian’s diving teams.

“My favorite thing about coaching is getting to see the progress everyone makes from their first practice to their last practice of the season,” Thain said. “It is also very inspiring to see the team build and see everyone support each other.”

No prior experience or knowledge is needed to join varsity diving and when most people join the team for the first time, they come with little to no diving experience.

“I decided to join diving last year because I hadn’t heard much about it and it sounded like a really fun and interesting sport,” Smith said, “I didn’t have any experience before joining.”

Despite not needing experience to join, there are typically only six to nine people on the team each season.

“This year we have 12 people, which is definitely more than in past years,” Sporl said. “I think going to SPC with the swim team last year helped people hear about us and created more interest in joining the team.”

Last year, the four divers that accompanied the swim team to SPC were seniors Sporl and Emily Loftus, and Campbell Harris and Fiona Chen, who graduated last spring. They placed sixth, fourth, seventh and third, respectively, and contributed 16 points to the swim team’s total score. The diving team has high hopes going into this season after last year’s SPC victory.

“We set a team goal to finish in the top six at SPC this year,” Smith said.