Dive Right In (6 page)

This time, her tuck was tight. She straightened out… and hit the water before she had straightened all the way.
Splat.
Not good.

When she went for the pike position, she knew before she hit the water that she had come out of the pike too soon, and that
her back was arched too much. But she didn’t make a huge splash. Better—a little.

The straight dive was pretty bad, Traci thought. In
her nervousness, she forgot to stretch her arms to the side before reaching over her head. Also, she didn’t lean forward enough,
so her entry was short of the ideal straight up-and-down. Sighing, Traci climbed out of the pool and dried herself with her
chamois, waiting for Margo to jump all over her.

But, surprisingly, Margo didn’t say much. She simply pointed out that Traci had a lot of work to do. She made no specific
criticisms at all and told Traci she’d see her at the next session.

Traci was relieved to have been spared a harsh scolding, but she still felt depressed as she changed. She walked by the older
girls and barely noticed them, lost in a cloud of gloom.

As she plodded home, Traci found it impossible to imagine that she could ever be a decent diver, let alone a great one.

S
ince Traci had the next day off from diving, she agreed to go shopping with Valerie. Traci biked to Valerie’s house and they
rode to the mall together. When they sat down at a snack shop in the food court, Valerie’s excitement was clear.

“I met my new coach and he’s
awesome!
What a difference from Jeff! This guy pumps you up when he just talks to you! He thinks I’ve got major potential, but says
I’d better be ready for the hardest work I’ve ever done. And I’m like, ‘Sure! That’s what I want!’ And he smiles and goes,
‘I think you’ll do fine.’ I can’t believe it, it’s too good to be true.”

Traci felt happy for her friend and tried to show it, but her spirits were so low that Valerie couldn’t help noticing.

“You don’t look so great,” she said. “That coach still giving you a hard time?”

Traci shook her head. “It isn’t Margo. I don’t know. This may be a mistake.”

“What
may be a mistake?” asked Valerie. “Working with Margo? I still think she’s—”

“I told you, it isn’t Margo. It’s
me.
I got my first chance to dive yesterday. Really dive, off a springboard. And I was
awful.”

Valerie stared at her friend. “Trace, it was your
first day.
Hello? What did you think, that you’d ace it like a gold-medal winner the first time? I don’t believe you were awful. I think
you were inexperienced. And it showed.”

Traci waved off Valerie’s explanation. “It wasn’t just that I didn’t dive well. When I got on that board, I was
scared.
I could barely get myself to move at all!”

“But you did dive, right?” Valerie asked.

“Yeah, I did—after Sophia, the assistant coach, gave me a pep talk. And I was the pits! I don’t have any talent for diving.
If I can’t dive, and I can’t be a gymnast, I don’t know. I better forget about being an athlete altogether.”

“Whoa!” Valerie said, holding up her hands. “That sounds pretty extreme. Look, you had a bad day, and now you’re overreacting,
that’s all.”

Traci laughed, but without humor. “I had a ‘bad day’? After all my years on the balance beam, it turns out I’m afraid of heights!
On a
one-meter board!
What’ll I do on a three-meter board? Or a ten-meter platform? That’s not a ‘bad day,’ Val. That’s a total disaster!”

When Valerie started to laugh, Traci couldn’t believe it.

“I’m sorry, Trace,” Valerie said, still chuckling. “I’m just remembering when we started out in gymnastics class. We were
terrified! Vaulting over a horse scared us, getting on a balance beam, even one that was barely above the floor, scared us!
I started to cry, and you stood like a statue. Remember?”

Traci couldn’t help smiling. “Yeah, we were pretty pathetic. But we were
little kids.
Four years old! Sure, we were scared. I’m twelve now, and I shouldn’t feel that way.”

Valerie shrugged. “Why not? You’re doing something new. Did you say anything to Margo or Sophia about being scared?”

“Well, Sophia told me that most divers are that way at first,” Traci admitted. “But Sophia’s nice, and I think she only wanted
to make me feel better.”

“Well,
I
think you just have to stick with it for a while and you’ll get past this. I know you, and I’m sure you can do whatever it
takes.” She finished her soda and grabbed her bag.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” she said. “I know a girl who’s a student of Margo’s, a girl in my class named Carly Freed. She said
she’d be happy to talk to you if you like. Want to call her when we get home?”

Traci agreed. When they got through to Carly, they made arrangements to eat lunch together at school the next day.

Traci’s mind wandered throughout classes the next morning. What would Carly have to say about Margo?

At lunchtime, Traci and Valerie grabbed a table. Valerie scanned the room, then pointed at a tall girl with dark hair. “That’s
her. Hey, Carly!” she shouted.

Traci recognized her as the first girl to speak up to defend the coach when Traci had bad-mouthed her. From Carly’s expression,
it was clear that she recognized Traci, too. But she said nothing about it.
The three girls spread their lunches out and started eating.

“Listen,” Traci said as soon as she could, “I want to say that I was out of line the other day. What I said about Margo, that
was wrong.”

Carly seemed to relax. “Okay. Just about everyone who works with Margo thinks she’s pretty great, including me. You’ll see
for yourself, eventually.”

Traci sighed. “If there
is
an ‘eventually.’ I’m not sure there will be.”

“How come? Are you thinking of quitting already?” asked Carly.

Traci shook her head and said, “Maybe I’ll get thrown out. Diving may not be my sport.”

Carly stared at Traci. “But you just started! How can you tell so soon?”

Traci explained about her fear on a one-meter springboard. “That isn’t the kind of thing a good diver has to worry about,
right?”

Carly laughed.
“Wrong!
Totally wrong!”

Valerie flashed Traci a grin. “See?”

“I’ve known maybe a hundred divers,” Carly said, “and most of them were frightened when they first started diving. I think
it’s the way most people are.
The first time I got on a diving board, I couldn’t move at all! I wanted to climb back down the ladder and go home.”

“How old were you?” Traci asked.

“Eight. But it doesn’t matter,” Carly said. “There are divers in my group who are
still
scared every time they dive. And they’re our age. They manage to deal with it somehow.”

Traci felt a little better. “What about you? Are you still scared?”

“Not as much as I once was. But I still get butterflies. Especially on a platform, for some reason.” Carly leaned forward
and looked hard at Traci.

“If you think that being scared is enough of a reason to quit diving, you’re wrong. And if you think that Margo is going to
give up on you, you’re wrong again. If Margo thinks you can be a diver, she’ll stand by you. And if she told you she thinks
you can be a good diver, believe it.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling her,” Valerie said, waving her hands in the air. “Maybe she’ll believe it coming from you,
since you’ve been there.”

“How did you get used to diving when you were afraid?” Traci asked.

Carly thought for a moment before replying. “The more I dived, the less the fear got to me. It didn’t go away, but it changed,
somehow. Now the butterflies give me a kind of jolt, a charge of, I don’t know, excitement and anticipation. It’s like my
nerves are tingling and every part of me is focused on the dive. Does that make sense?”

Traci nodded slowly. “You know what? It does. It’s the way I used to feel right before starting my routine on the balance
beam. I felt electric.”

“Exactly!” Carly said, grinning.

Valerie laughed and turned to Carly. “Trace was an awesome gymnast, until she suddenly got so tall and her knees started giving
her trouble. She was almost as good as me!”

“Almost?”
Traci yelled in mock outrage. “You never saw the day you could do a balance beam routine as good as mine!”

“Well, with my new coach, I’ll ace the balance beam soon. I bet he’s as good as Margo,” Valerie answered.

“Margo’s something else,” Carly said, the admiration in her voice clear. “And, Traci, you’ll find out that she really cares
about everyone she works with.
I can’t really say more than that, because Margo doesn’t like us to brag about her. But she’d do anything for us—and we’d
do anything for her.”

Traci sat back and thought about Carly’s devotion to the coach. Margo must have done something to deserve it. Then and there,
she told herself that she’d master her fear of the board and her anxiety over Margo somehow. And that she’d keep on with her
diving.

D
uring the next month, Traci found that Carly had been right. Her fear was slowly changing into that electric kind of jolt
they’d talked about. Traci never relaxed completely on a springboard, but maybe that was a good thing. It was what Margo had
said early on: Being nervous meant you paid attention more—and weren’t as likely to mess up or get hurt.

At the same time, her diving improved. A week after learning simple forward dives, Traci began working on backward dives.
She started with a simple backward dive in the straight position.

“As you jump,” Sophia said, “arch your back and neck to see the water as you enter.”

On Traci’s first try, she didn’t keep her body straight and hit the water with a huge splash. But she didn’t
get upset. She knew that she wasn’t expected to be perfect right away. She climbed out of the pool, looked at Sophia, and
said, “Oops.”

Sophia laughed. “You arched your back, but you didn’t keep those muscles tense, so you bent into a sort of tuck. Keep your
muscles tight and stay in a straight line this time.”

Traci got better until, on her last try, she was almost vertical on her entry. Sophia’s grin showed Traci that she had done
well.

Traci then went on to the backward dive in a tuck position. “This is tougher,” said Sophia. “As you jump, you have to lean
away from the board a little to get clear of it when you come down. On the way up, bring your knees to your chest and grab
your shins; then straighten and use a ‘lateral entry.’ That means—”

“I know,” Traci cut in, smiling. “I stretch my arms to the side and then overhead in my come-out. Right?”

“You’re getting to be an expert,” Sophia replied. “Let’s see the dive.”

Standing with her back to the pool, Traci made
sure that her heels overhung the end of the board. She closed her eyes and visualized the dive: the tuck, the come-out, and
the entry. She bent her knees and jumped. The dive was far from perfect—she hit the water before her hands came together—but
it wasn’t bad. The next attempts were better.

The backward dive in the pike position was less trouble for Traci. “These backward dives are easier for me than the forward
ones,” she told Sophia. “Is that weird, or normal?”

“Divers often have less trouble with backward dives,” Sophia said. “Maybe because you don’t have to worry about an approach.”

The same day Traci started on backward dives, she added a new skill to her frontward dives: somersaults. As a gymnast, Traci
figured that somersaults wouldn’t be too hard for her, and she was partly right. She was all right doing a frontward one-and-a-half
somersault dive in the tuck position. Traci was supposed to do a complete spin in the air and come down to enter the water
headfirst. Sophia had her lean forward as she left the board to get the somersault started. Traci picked it up quickly.

The same dive in the pike position, however—spinning with her legs straight and bending only at the waist—was harder. Sophia
said, “You need more forward lean, and try to get higher off the board.”

After a bad dive in which she hit the water before coming out of the pike, Traci got better.

“Want to try two and a half somersaults?” Sophia asked.

Traci felt confident. “Why not?” But when she tried it, she lost sight of the water and hit the surface flat on her back.
The mistake bothered her more than the pain.

“How do you keep track of where you are when you’re spinning like that?” she asked Sophia.

“It’s called ‘visual spotting,’” Sophia said. “The idea is to pick out something that you can see each time you spin around.”
She pointed to a clock on the wall facing the springboard. “Use the clock. Each time you see it, you’ve completed another
somersault. When you’ve done your last one, it’s time for your come-out.”

Traci looked at the clock. “I’ll try.” Sure enough, she found that watching for the clock as she turned
helped keep her from getting lost. But she still didn’t have enough time to straighten out before reaching the water.

“You need more lean,” Sophia said, “and you need to get more spring from your legs when you leave the board.”

On her fifth attempt, Traci bent her knees and sprang upward as hard as she could. She had enough lift to finish her come-out
and hit the water with her body in a straight line.

But Traci couldn’t do a two-and-a-half somersault dive in the pike position. She couldn’t finish the spins in time, even after
several attempts.

“It’s okay,” said Sophia. “You’re doing great! Margo has exercises to strengthen your legs and give you extra lift.”

Margo came to see Traci’s progress at every session. She would always give Traci some pointers for her to work on. Traci started
writing them in a notebook and studied it every day. Margo never praised Traci, but Sophia provided plenty of support.

Several sessions later, Traci began working on reverse and inward dives. Though Traci was more self-assured now, she found
these dives scary because
she had to tumble
toward
the board instead of away from it.