Making a splash at Sheerr

Diving is a strange mix of fear, love, pain and courage. Four Penn divers are taking the plunge this season. Kathie Dykes doesn't want to get out of the pool. She's not a rude person, nor is she shy. On the contrary, she seems extremely confident -- as confident as she needs to be to do what she does. The sopping wet sophomore begrudgingly agrees to be interviewed. She smiles, but her eyes betray her. She regrets every minute spent away from the pool, away from her sport. Kathie Dykes is a diver. · When most think of diving, images of summer come to mind -- images of jumping higher and higher on a springboard before submerging oneself in the dark blue of the deep end; of drenching unlucky onlookers with a well-timed cannonball; or of the gleeful red sting of a bellyflop. The world of competitive diving, however, is a largely unheralded one, given perhaps a brief thought once every four years when the Summer Olympics captures the imagination of the world. Competitive diving, especially at the college level, is a completely different animal from the diving done in backyards across America. When one dives for sport instead of for kicks, bellyflops are born of error -- not of summertime fun -- and those red stings are never, ever gleeful. Pain is as much a part of the sport as jumping or flipping or turning. And divers know it. "For the divers, it's all about forgetting about the fact that you might hit your head on the board or you might break your hand or your toe or your whole leg, or the fact that you might smack on the water, and it's going to absolutely kill," Penn senior diver Mike Previti said. "It's about forgetting about that and just focusing on what you personally think you can do before you hit the water." "If something gets weird on the diving board, it usually results in injuring yourself or smacking on the water," Penn diver Matt Cornell added. "I tend to block those out in my memory." The solidly built Previti, who began diving for the Quakers last year after spending eight years as a gymnast, is familiar with the possibility of pain and the fear that walks hand-in-hand with it. "We definitely crash a lot. I probably crash more than most," Previti said, laughing. "I did a back one-and-a-half one time, I was coming down right on top of the board, and I caught it with my hands and pushed myself off. Scared the shit out of myself. I don't think I've ever heard my heart beat that fast before." Cornell knows, perhaps better than any Quakers diver, what can happen when things go wrong off the board. The sophomore broke his hand performing a dive in practice last semester. "Since I hit my hand on a reverse one-and-a-half, I've been a little tentative about doing any types of reverses," said Cornell, who nonetheless performed the weekend after his injury. "It's one of the things that comes with diving. It's the first really hard hit I've had on the board before, and it's something you gotta get over. "Being scared is one of the things that makes diving great. You have that fear, and you just have to overcome it and do the dive anyway." Perhaps this is best summed up by what goes through Kathie Dykes' mind before a dive. "Don't die," she said. The problem of pain is exacerbated by the way the Quakers train. While some schools use a "dry board" system in which divers learn new dives by experimenting with them in harnesses attached to ropes and pulleys, the small swimming facilities at the continually renovated Gimbel Gym puts this expensive training device out of reach for the Quakers. The Penn divers must instead learn their dives on the real thing -- meaning they are much more likely to get hurt. In fact, for Penn divers, almost all training is done into the water. "Pretty much all our training is done on the board," Previti said. "The only thing that's important is that your legs be strong enough, to get you up in the air pretty high. No one really lifts. Some of us lift anyway -- I personally lift, but not so much for the team, just to look good at the beach." Even to those who have just watched diving on television, it is clear that the sport is extraordinary -- and that those who participate in it are a unique bunch. "I've known a lot of divers now in my life, and they're definitely different types of people from swimmers," Penn swimming coach Mike Schnur said. Schnur, who has been around the Penn swimming and diving program for several years as a swimmer in the late 1980s and as an assistant coach for most of the 1990s, acknowledges the intestinal fortitude that divers must possess. "The divers have, in a lot of ways, a lot more guts than swimmers do, a lot more guts than most athletes because half their practice they spend crashing, you know, landing on their heads, and landing on their backs, and in pain, and they get right back up and do it," Schnur said. "Most of them have no fear at all." The Penn divers concur. "[We are] probably a little more adventure-seeking than the swimmers," Previti said. "Divers have to be a little more, you know, 'What if I could throw one more flip in there? I wonder if I could put one more twist in there before I smack my head on the water.'" The soft-spoken but fiery Cornell, who hails from York, Pa., put it more bluntly. "You gotta have the balls to do hard dives," he said. "That's what it comes down to. When it comes to swimming, you gotta be muscular, you gotta have good lungs and all that more athletic stuff. But diving is more about concentration, like psyching yourself up to do a dive and just having the balls to try something hard." · As a group, the Penn divers are neither exclusively born nor exclusively made. While Cornell and Dykes were taught the art of projecting themselves into water at a young age, Previti and Penn freshman Sue Breslin learned the ropes as college students. "I came here [to Gimbel] to work out in the weightroom, and they kicked me out because I had on khakis," said Previti, who began diving last year. "So then I went to go swimming, and I was swimming in my boxer shorts. And the diving coach tapped me on the head and told me I had to get out of the pool because they had practice and I told him I wanted to try out for the team." Both Previti and Breslin seem to have a steep learning curve. Breslin -- who dove in a summer league during junior high school -- has noticeably improved from meet to meet this season, despite the fact that she cannot devote all of her practice time to diving. Breslin was recruited as a swimmer, but she volunteered to dive when Dykes decided to take the fall off to concentrate on her studies -- a great help to a team that consistently lost points at meets last season for not having any divers at all. "It definitely hasn't helped her swimming at all," Schnur said of Breslin's double duty in the pool and on the board. "She's balancing two sports, two demanding time sports and really can't focus 100 percent on either of them. But she's improved a lot as a diver this year." The magnitude of Breslin's feats is not lost on her fellow divers. "Sue is amazing," Previti said. "It's unreal enthusiasm, it's just like 'Oh, let's do this, and I want to do this!' And I'll do a dive, and she's like, 'I want to learn that!'" One might think that Breslin, as both a swimmer and a diver, serves as a liaison of sorts between the two squads. But the relationship between the teams is already very strong. "We take bus trips together. We eat together when we go away on road trips," Penn swimmer Cathy Holland said. "[The swimmers are] definitely friends with the divers." "You don't want to have a situation where you have the swimming team separate from the diving team," Schnur said. "You want them all as one team. When you have that, you have a program that's really doing well. "When we have diving recruits come in this year, they've stayed with the swimmers. They inherit the idea that they're part of the whole team, not just the small diving team." · Love hurts. Divers know that slaps, smacks and cracks are part of the sport -- when one does not properly respect the water, it can be as hard and as unforgiving as concrete. So why do divers dive? It's very simple -- they love to do it. "If you're in day in and day out, if you're in the pool and you're not enjoying yourself, there's no point in coming," Penn diving coach Daphne Hernandez said. The passion divers have for their sport encompasses many things -- camaraderie, laughs, adrenaline, glory and the sheer thrill of flying through the air with the greatest of ease. For one thing, the lighter moments that inevitably present themselves to a group as tight as the Penn divers enrich the diving experience. Of the Fab Four -- Dykes, Breslin, Previti and Cornell -- Previti had no trouble identifying who the class clown is. "Kathie is a nut," he said. "She's just a spaz. She makes practice really fun. She always does the weirdest things, and it always gets a smile out of me. "We have a mobile jacuzzi, it's like a little hot tub so that we don't get cold. She's always running around in circles trying to make whirlpools." As a grin lit up her face, Dykes gave a rebuttal to her male counterpart's partial disclosure. "Did Previti tell you this? Oh, dude," she said, laughing. "That was Previti and me last year. We decided to see if we could start a whirlpool in the hot tub at the end of practice. "Diving, you get to goof off a lot more, because there's down time in between the boards [dives]. You can either stretch, or whatever. You can crack jokes, tell stories, do stupid things -- like running around in the hot tub." There is definitely something more to diving than just fun and games, something in the pastime that calls to its converts. Perhaps it is the innate human desire to escape the bonds of Earth and its garish gravity that causes divers to leap. Or perhaps they really like to splash a lot. Or perhaps it is a love of pushing themselves to the breaking point, of adding that one flip or turn before water reluctantly gives way to flesh and bone. "For every dive you do, you can do that dive better than you've ever done it before," Cornell said. "And that challenge is what makes it fun for me." · The interview is over. Kathie Dykes has returned to the pool and resumes her diving. The humidity in Sheerr Pool is oppressive as Dykes climbs up the ladder of the three-meter diving board. The board bends at her command, ready to send her into the air, if only for a short second or two. Splash.

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