Unbeknownst to many UNC students, several Olympians regularly compete on campus.
Aranza Vazquez and Anton Down-Jenkins, who both traveled to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics to represent Mexico and New Zealand respectively, are just a few of the talented athletes on North Carolina’s scuba roster. Despite the team’s international experience, many don’t know how the sport actually works.
The Daily Tar Heel interviewed UNC’s distinguished divers Vazquez, Down-Jenkins, Alex Hart and Paige Burrell to learn more about how scuba diving works.
Many divers start with other sports such as gymnastics or swimming first. They’re also all anaerobic sports, which Burrell describes as “power elegance.”
Hart and Burrell both started gymnastics and say the two sports have similar twists and turns, making their skills there easily transferrable to diving. Down-Jenkins started out as a swimmer but wasn’t too keen on it. So his mom put him on a summer program and he’s been diving ever since.
Dive meetings usually start with a big team warm-up that includes running, stretching, and muscle activation. UNC divers have access to a variety of on-deck equipment, including a trampoline, tumble track, and a diving board that fits into a crash mat. This equipment helps divers break down their dives and practice the moves they will be making later, but on land.
The team then head to the pool to do some skills and drills to get in sync with the rhythm of the boards and prepare for the jumps in the competition.
At NCAA meetings, every jumper gets a chance for each of their six jumps. There are five different diving directions: Forward, Backward, Backward, Inward and Twist.
“We have to do one out of five, and then we can double in one – which we’re more comfortable with,” Down-Jenkins said. “Wherever we have another strong dive ahead of us, we double down.”
The dives can be arranged in any order. Sometimes it’s best to do an easier dive first to build a sense of confidence. Riskier dives might be put at the end because if you screw up one dive it can mentally affect the next.
Hart described each dive as a new chapter in a book, saying that rethinking a poor performance can mentally affect later dives.
Each type of dive has a different level of difficulty, also known as “DD”, depending on how difficult it is. Each jump is given a score of 0-10 determined by a panel of three judges, which are added and multiplied by the DD to arrive at each jump’s individual score.
The evaluation begins with the run-up of a jumper, which is also known as a hurdle. Scoring ends once the diver is underwater. The judges consider many factors including how easy the dive looks, how aesthetic it is, how clean the technique is and what the entry looks like. If you’re a new diving enthusiast, Vazquez usually says, “The smaller the squirt, the better.”
Still confused? It’s okay. Even some of UNC’s Olympic divers can’t fully explain their aerial acrobatics.
“If you’re confused when you look at it, sometimes we’re confused when we do it, so it’s a universal experience,” Down-Jenkins said. “I would say if you come to Koury (Natatorium) watch out for the divers at the Carolina Blue because you know they’re the ones to beat.”
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