Diving in college and 2016 Olympics

Question
Hello! My name is Bobbie Jo and I have been doing gymnastics for about 8 years and was going to be a level 9 but seriously shattered my left wrist and had to forcefully retire. I am a 17 year old senior in high school and here is my question. As a senior is it a lost cause or too late to get involved with diving? With my Gymnastics background it doesn't seem like it would be too hard but I would want to do College Diving my Junior year ,or when I was ready ,and I am seriously interested in the 2016 Olympics. I live in Peru, Indiana and would like to go to Indiana University and was wondering what dives they look for? Am I a washed up ex-gymnast or is there hope for me? Thank You!

Answer
Bobbie Jo -

To answer your first question - no it is not too late to get involved in diving. There have been many internationally successful divers who started diving at your age, some older. To give you an example, the USA man who won the gold medal in the 1992 Olympics did not start diving until his freshman year in college and before that he was a wrestler! Diving is more of a life time sport than gymnastics and there are divers who do not dive in their first Olympics until after college.

Most of diving is comprised of girls age 12 to 24 and most of them are ex-gymnasts so you should fit right in. There are two obstacles I see you facing. One is that the closest good club team programs to you are found about 70 miles away either at Notre Dame University or Purdue University. I do not know of any club teams closer to you than that. You need to start this sport as soon as you can to get ready for college. I will give you the contact info about these coaches/programs at the end of my answer.

The second obstacle I see for you is how well your shattered wrist is going to allow you to go head first, especially from 3 meters or higher. The level of diving you want to achieve requires that all of your dives go head first. There will be plenty of skills you will learn that go feet first but if you want to be elite, your competitive dives will have to be headfirst. To give you an idea of what I mean, you need to go to this website and do the following:

www.diving.about.com. Look for "Browse Topic" on the homepage on the left. Click on "Diving Instruction" and then look for the article "Grabbing a Flat Hand...". Read that article and then click on the words "Flat Hand". Look at the picture of the diver grabbing their hands together. That is how you have to enter the water headfirst to get a good entry. You will have to use the hand on the bad wrist to grab the hand on the good wrist so that good wrist takes all the pressure of the entry. You will probably need to use wrist supports. Athletes use Tiger Paws for
divers and I am sure you are familiar with this product as we got it from gymnastics.

To find out what dives college divers use, I am going to give you another website to go to. College divers only do optional dives. These are the harder ones with lots of flips and twists. No easy compulsory/fundamental dives are used at the Division I level like Indiana.

www.usadiving.org. Click on Resources and then Rule Book. Scroll down to Part III and click on Appendix D1. This will take you to the degree of difficulty list of all the dives that can be done on the two springboard events.Look for these dives numbers:

1 meter =  104, 105, 203, 303,403, 5132, 5134, 5233, 5333. There are other dives that women do but this is a starting point.

3 meter = 105,107,205,305,405,5134,5233,5235,5152,5333,5235. Again there are more done than what I have listed.

I won't go into platform as that comes later in diving and for some, not at all. Some divers love platform and other world class divers never even go off of it. It just depends on if you like being up that high.

Go to www.flipnrip.com. At the top of the homepage, click on videos. (If you have to register, it is free). Click on Diving Lessons and review all 6 videos produced by the coach from Indiana, Jeff Huber. This will give you an idea of what you need to know.Lots of other videos here to check out. Also lots of videos on YouTube.

To contact the Notre Dame coach about club diving for non college students go to the usadiving.org website and click on clubs and then find a club. Enter IN and look for Double Dragon Diving and the contact the excellent Chinese coach there in South Bend.

To find the Purdue coaches, Adam Soldati and his Olympian diver wife Kimiko, use a search engine to find the schools athletic department website and click on swimming and diving and I am sure you will find his e-mail. He is a great coach and produced last years NCAA National champ and 2008 Olympic team member.

I know these schools are a long way to go but if you want to attain your goals you will have to train at a great pool (Purdue's is the best) with a great coach. If they are too far to go, you should consider cross training on trampoline. Every great diver knows how to use a tramp to learn their harder dives.There are great divers who switched from tramp to diving for the same reason you want to - an injury. You also need to maintain the flexibility and abdominal strength you attained as a gymnast - do not let these physical attributes get away from you as you need them in diving.

Hope all this helps. Good luck with the transition.