Sophomore Bianca DeLuca stands at the edge of the diving board, her back to the pool and arms spread parallel to the water. She takes a moment to focus in, taking a deep breath, going through the motions of her dive in her head and shutting out any outside noise. Then, DeLuca springs off of the board, twists twice in the air and enters the water with barely a splash.
Diving, like many sports, is a mental battle as much as it is physical. DeLuca faces fear every day while diving and is constantly working to overcome it.
“You have to get over fear and mental blocks. During competitions, you can’t let your fear get in the way of your performance because you know that you can do the skills that you’re doing and the dives you want to do, but if you let your fear get in the way, obviously you won’t do as good as you do in practice. I just think of competitions as practice,” DeLuca said.
Diving coach Elizabeth Lukes has been coaching for 28 years and explains that diving is a sport where you really have to trust your coach’s instruction and your own ability. She speaks on what makes diving so scary.
“I would say a lot of what is difficult about diving comes down to it’s not a sport that you can spot. Like in gymnastics, most tricks that you do, your coach is able to spot and manipulate you. So, in diving, it’s a little bit different in a sense that you have to trust the process of not only what you can do physically but also what your coach tells you. …It’s really a mind-over-matter situation with managing fear,” Lukes said.
Lukes constantly tells her divers to trust the process and believe in themselves. In practice, she emphasizes that she would never ask the divers to do anything they weren’t ready to do.
“There’s always a sense of a certain amount of risk-taking that you have to take where you have to fight that fear a little bit, but as a coach in my position, I have to make that decision to say that the risk that you’re taking is to overcome your fear, not a risk to take where you’re either going to hurt yourself or not hurt yourself. I always tell them, I can want it for you all you want, but that doesn’t matter unless you want it and you believe in the process of what we’re doing,” Lukes said.
Of course, there are times where risk taking does end in injury. DeLuca has been hurt by dives before, but she makes an effort to push through these setbacks, especially in meets.
“I’ve definitely smacked a lot of times. This one time when I was trying a new dive, I smacked so hard that there was a bruise all the way down my back. And one time I got two black eyes. …I can’t let that impact my dives going forward. I’ve smacked in meets before, and obviously that impacts the rest of my meet, but you have to try your hardest to not let it,” DeLuca said.
DeLuca will compete at Sectionals on Nov. 4.
