Swimming & Diving: 'Acrobats' make a splash in college competition

Swimming and diving are lumped together so often that they are practically thought of as the same sport. Yes, they both require a pool, but talk to a diver for a few minutes and you will find that that is where the similarities end.

“They’re really not very similar at all,” senior diver Stevie Vines said. “Diving is acrobatics, whereas swimming, I think, is more like classical track — strength and endurance.”

In fact, while few experienced swimmers make the transition to diving, many divers start out as gymnasts. As senior diver Chris Kelly notes, they often find diving to be a similar but less physically taxing means of challenging themselves.

“Gymnastics is really hard on your body, so you’ll get injured and maybe try diving because it has less impact,” Kelly said. “They’re very similar in the sense that you’re doing twists. The actions are similar.”

Kelly is not a gymnast-turned-diver, as he took up diving after his father’s boss won free diving lessons at a silent auction. Vines, however, started out on the trampoline at a gym near his elementary school.

“When the gym closed, I didn’t really want to drive all the way out to the other gym,” he said. “I was already somewhat talented on the diving board, just because it was similar to trampoline: You’re doing flips and stuff.”

When a family friend recommended he join a diving team, Vines decided to go for it. He is now a two-time Ivy League individual champion and a captain of the Princeton squad.

Kelly pointed out that there are plenty of differences between diving and gymnastics, only one of which is that gymnasts must land on their feet while divers do the opposite. Still, the sports require similar skill sets and are scored similarly.

At diving competitions, each diver does six dives. There are five types, one of which a diver must choose to do twice in a meet: fronts, backs, reverse flips, inward flips and twists.

“Everyone has different strengths and weaknesses,” Kelly said. “That’s one of the cool things about diving — there are so many ways to make a dive.”

A panel of judges — usually three — gives each dive a score ranging from zero to 10. Those scores (or, if there are more judges, the middle three scores) are then taken and multiplied by the degree of difficulty, or DD, of the dive. Individual scores are added together (and added to the scores of the swim team) to find a team’s final score.

Although there is an inescapable subjectivity to this system, Vines said that divers can usually predict what score their dive will get before they see what the judges thought.

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“Pretty much everyone diving, on the Princeton team at least, we’re all experienced enough to know how our dives went before we get the score,” he said. “Most of the time after you do a dive you know within a certain range, like a point or half a point.”

An interesting facet of the scoring system, at least in the Ivy League, is that the judges are typically the coaches of the competing teams. This may sound like a bad idea, but Vines said that coaches will often be harder on their teams than on their opponents, in order to point out what needs to be worked on in practice.

What does need to be worked on in practice? At the beginning of a season, divers focus on learning new dives and reviewing fundamentals. As the season progresses, they turn away from learning new dives and focus on perfecting their repertoires. Different divers have different strengths and weaknesses and will have to work on different things as the season progresses, but the team is still important.

“It’s definitely an individual sport,” Kelly said. “But one of the things that’s fun, that I love about diving, is that you’re all doing it together.”

In addition to having people to learn alongside, Kelly said practicing with the team also helps because it is good to have people to laugh at your mistakes.

Though they do not share much else, swimmers and divers do share the pool and, at Princeton, usually practice times. The result is that the teams are actually very close, despite the differences in their sports.

Vines, who has roomed with swimmer senior Rory Loughran for two years, said that it is difficult to tell whether someone is a swimmer or a diver. While swimmers do tend to have larger wingspans, there is no set body type that immediately says “diver.”

The competition, however, can often be gauged based on the divers’ warm-ups. By observing how each diver jumps or walks on the board, Vines said he could almost always tell how tough the competition would be.

Divers focus mostly on the little things, like warm-up jumps and how someone stands on the board, that a casual observer would overlook.

“The way you go off the end of the board is the most important part of the dive,” Kelly said. “Everyone focuses on the entry and the splash, which of course is fun to look at, but a lot of that is determined by how you go off the board.”

Little modifications in the pre-dive stages can make all the difference, and the hope of perfecting them in order to master a new dive is what draws Kelly, and many others, to the sport.

“For me, it’s kind of like a thrill, because you get to try something new and push yourself,” he said. “It’s the rush you get when you learn a new dive, that type of thing. There’s always a next level and every practice you can get better.”