Spring sports are starting up at San Luis Obispo High School, with athletes practicing for upcoming meets. Among these spring sports is Boys and Girls Swim and Dive, with their first meet on February 20 at Sinsheimer Pool. The SLOHS pool will not be done. Swim and dive are joined together into one category, leaving dive to be overshadowed by the large amount of swim participants.

   “I chose to do dive because it’s a new challenge and puts together being graceful and pushing to achieve hard skills. I honestly think it’s underappreciated because it’s such a small team and I think it just gets put with swim, so people forget about it,” said freshman and first year diver, Gia Anselmo.

  Dive is thought to be an easy sport by many. Actually, Dive requires incredible core strength and flexibility to keep the correct form when going straight into the water and minimize the amount of splash.

    “Dive taught me how to be more confident in myself because I was able to learn things and do things I didn’t know I was capable of. Dive is constantly associated with swim and it is never advertised. It was only talked about on TNN once or twice last year and no one ever would listen to it. The pool is also located off campus, making it hard to parents to pick up there so some students are not able to participate. Basically, the pool needs to be built and hopefully that may make it easier,” said junior and former diver Reece Candaele.

  A high school varsity duel dive meet, meaning two teams competing against each other, consists of each diver having at least six dives. The dive categories being: forward, back, reverse, inward, and twisting. The sixth and final dive can be from either one of the previous categories, but not a previously used dive.

  After competing at the high school level, divers go onto regional or state. Divers have to complete 11 dives for this meet.

  Dive is a challenging, yet fun sport that takes a lot of time and effort to succeed.  Be sure to check out this sport at the next home meet.