From the it’ll-never-happen-in-a-million-years file:
Two guys walk into a bar.
First guy: “If you ask me, the inward tuck 2 1/2 is definitely harder than the reverse 1 1/2 with 1 1/2 twists.”
Second guy: “Is not.”
First guy: “Is too.”
Diving just isn’t a sport that causes a big to-do. Instead, divers learn to make do.
The NBA has Michael Jordan. Diving makes do with Greg Louganis.
In high school, diving’s profile is so low, it makes do without one.
“At LT, half the people don’t even know there is a diving team,” says Lyons Township diver Ben Dybas.
“As a sport,” says Lyons senior Jerry Marks, “it’s really small-sort of like girls bowling.”
“Before this year,” says Fenton’s Pete Fiduccia, “I didn’t even think high schools had diving. A girl in front of me in class told me.”
Divers put up with more than a lack of attention, though.
Like:
Swim coaches who get bent out of shape when divers cut into their pool time. Pools with lousy boards. Meets at 9 a.m. on Saturday when normal people are still asleep. And practices that put a premium on accuracy.
At Hinsdale Central, typical of many older pools, divers and swimmers practice together. But with no separate diving well, as in many newer facilities, the Red Devils may dive only when the lap swimmers below are at the other end of the pool. “We just have to find a hole,” says diving coach Leif Erickson.
Mostly, though, divers and their coaches say they can’t complain.
“We can live with the lack of attention,” says Larry Klepek, who coaches the Fenwick and Oak Park diving teams. “Then again, it’s nice when you get it. I talked to coach Cal (Fenwick swim coach Jim Caliendo), and he’s going to have Fenwick Swimming and Diving Team put on our T-shirts this year instead of just Fenwick Swimming. It’s something.”
Really something is the routine Lyons diving coach Sherry Husa puts herself through. In the Make-Do Coach of the Year balloting, she wins by a landslide.
As a former state finalist at Lyons, Husa was an expert at going off the deep end. Still is.
Here’s Husa’s never-come-up-for-air schedule:
Rise before dawn for a ride on the Metra from her home in Aurora to her insurance company job in Chicago. Work 8 to 5. Ride the rails back to Aurora. Eat dinner. Drive to La Grange. Assume bus driver mode. Collect her six-man Lyons Township diving team and bus them to York High School in Elmhurst. Meet the one-man Fenton diving team-sophomore Pete Fiduccia. Conduct diving practice for all, Fiduccia included, from 7:50 p.m. till 9:30, alongside the Fenton swimming team.
(Fenton swimmers practice at York because Fenton has no pool. Husa and her divers practice at York because Lyons removed its diving boards in 1984. Water depth under the boards was short of the new 10-foot state standards.)
Practice over, Husa drives the bus back to La Grange, climbs into her car, drives to Aurora and falls into bed.
Runner-up to Husa in the make-do category is Klepek. Fenwick’s pool has no boards, and Oak Park’s team had no coach. Enter Klepek. Weeknights find him coaching five Friars and five Huskies at the Oak Park pool. Meets, he says, are also no problem.
“When I go to a Fenwick meet I wear a Fenwick shirt, and when I go to an Oak Park meet I wear an Oak Park shirt,” he says. “It works out good.”
What doesn’t always work out well is the diving-swimming connection. Swimmers and divers make do with their sometimes-uneasy alliance.
On the up side, diving coaches say that without swimmers to carry the weight, providing the divers with reflected glory, there might not even be high school diving. In addition, the spirit derived from working out with the swimmers is hard to generate on a two-man diving team. A lot goes back to the coaches.
“Anything that makes the divers feel a part of the swimming team is a help,” says Deerfield diver Seth Kane, who took sixth at state last year. “As we get close to a big meet, our swim coach here (Art Edstrom) is very accommodating toward diving. We use only one board here, but he makes sure to put only a few swimmers in the lane we’re using so we can get in extra work. After all, we contribute a lot of points to the team score.”
“Here, we work hard not to separate swimmers and divers,” says Naperville Central diving coach Tony Amabile. “We’re not our own little utopia. We feel connected.”
One big reason is the school’s new pool, complete with diving well, allowing divers and swimmers to practice together without having to dodge one other. Amabile has 20 divers this year, a turnout he believes is a direct result of the new well.
Lyons’ Husa, who had just two divers last year, admits to being jealous of Amabile.
“To be honest, it’s very tough,” Husa says of being forced to truck off to York all the time. “Though we really try to integrate the teams, I as a coach can’t even tell you who our swimmers are. And if it’s tough on me, it’s much tougher on them (athletes). We try to structure team activities. But just for example, we don’t see our swimmers against Oak Park because it’s our home meet. So the Oak Park swimmers are at LT and we’re at Oak Park diving. The only time we see the swimmers is at the Thursday potluck.”
Still, the Lions make do: Lyons’ Tom Caruso won the state diving title last year without ever once diving in his own high school pool.
Making it harder is that divers and swimmers fit together like actors and football players. Divers twist, turn and preen. Swimmers gut it out.
“Swimming and diving are completely different sports,” says Lyons swim coach John Glimco. “Diving is a performance sport, a psychological sport. The only thing the two have in common is they both take place in water.”
“(Diving) doesn’t fit in with a swimming meet,” says Hinsdale Central’s Erickson. “We should have a tank of water in the gymnastics room.”
The oil-water concoction causes divers and their coaches to fear that someday divers will have to make do on their own.
“I’ve heard talk of making it a separate sport,” says Husa. “I’ve also heard talk they might phase it out altogether. The insurance to carry it is expensive, and I think some higher-ups think the sport is in decline and interest is waning.”
Not true, says Downers Grove South diving coach Mark Antonoff.
“The numbers have been steady,” says Antonoff, who serves on the IHSA Swimming Advisory Committee, “My understanding of the rumors is that the national federation asked for some feedback, and one of the ideas presented was to separate swimming and diving. But I know of nothing initiated by anyone in Illinois. I talk to Ola Bundy (IHSA assistant executive director) all the time. And she has never supported anything that would hurt diving.”
Klepek says separating diving from swimming would definitely do that: “It would just kill it.”
“Do divers take a back seat to swimming?” adds Klepek. “Always. Back in high school (Lyons), I remember people saying to me, `You went to state in diving? Oh, that’s nothing.’
“Some swimming coaches feel like they don’t need diving. They feel like it takes up meet time, wastes their time. Or they don’t like divers diving on top of their swimmers in practice. Fortunately, that’s not the case at Oak Park or Fenwick. At good schools, the coaches work well together.”
“It’s obvious to me,” says Antonoff, “that if they ever split swimming and diving, that swimming would take precedence. Splitting the two would be the first domino in diving’s death.”
