What happens when you have two elite swimmers, a pool, and a diving board? A new Seattle Prep Girls Dive Team.
This past fall, a new Girls Dive team was added to the Swimming team. Junior Kate Leahy and Sophomore Anastasia Greene are the two athletes on the team coached by the current Metro League Dive Coach, Ed Artis. These divers practice at various pools– such as Queen Anne, Evans, and Rainier Beach –during the weeknights to allow the opportunity for them to dive as well as swim for the team if they wanted.
Although the swim team and the Dive team do not practice together, they still enjoy cheering each other on at the swim meets. Kirsti Rochon, the girls swimming head coach, says “the swimmers look forward to watching the divers during their competition and are so impressed with what they can do.”
Rochon also says by having the diving team, they are able to compete with the larger teams at a higher level in the Metro League. Scored out of 10, 5 judges score the dives at the competitions. From there, the highest and lowest scores are dropped, the remaining 3 scores are added together then multiplied by the degree of difficulty of the dive to get the final score.
Support for this program is highly encouraged by coming to the diving competitions every Friday to cheer on Leahy and Greene. The regular Metro League Meet schedule can be found on the Metro League website.
Diving is a difficult sport, says Rochon, where you have to put yourself in the spotlight and everyone is focused on you. Leahy and Greene “are paving the way and are outstanding role models of how to do this both gracefully and powerfully.”
This program has been a great addition to the team and they are hoping that it will continue to grow by attracting more girls to try out. Rochon states that the team has “brought a new energy to our team as a whole” and hopes that they will “have a diving team for years to come.”