With NCAA Zone C Diving Championships coming this weekend for three University of Evansville divers, diving coach Eric Blevins took time to give a few pointers for those who may not know the ins and outs of diving.
• Judges are typically looking for five things.
Approach, height from the approach, distance from the board, how it looks in the air and entry are keys to a good dive. Judges look for those five things in a combination when they score from 1-10.
• During practice, focus on a few dives at a time.
Blevins said that days before a meet, he has the divers choose two or three dives to focus on one day and then move on to two or three more dives the next day and so on. Then one day before a meet, they focus on all the dives and get repetitious with them.
“I also like it when they don’t balk, which is when they go to the end of the board and stop, because in a meet you aren’t going to have a perfect approach, so they need to learn to do that in practice.”
• The best way to get over fears on the board is to just do the dive.
Blevins believes that the more you do a dive, the more comfortable you are going to start feeling with it. “Typically when I have a diver do a new dive, I will call them out, which means like they won’t know where they are in the air, so when they hear me yell that means that they come out of it and look for the water. So when they get used to me doing that, they kind of get a feeling of where they are in the air.”
• Throw the towel…hard.
“I really don’t know why divers throw them so hard before they dive,” Blevins said. “Every diver does it. I think it’s one of those things that ‘I’m going to make my sound louder than yours.’ I never did it. I guess it makes this cool sound, like a really big smack, and gets others’ attention.”
