Dive Right In (3 page)

“Huh,” Valerie said. “So you hated it.”

Traci sighed. “Jeff was always giving you compliments. Even when you messed up, he’d say something to make you feel better.
He’s really sweet, you know? And Margo is just so… icy. Working with her isn’t going to be any fun at all. Zero.”

Valerie nodded, looking thoughtful. “I see what you mean. But maybe it’ll be better when you’re in a group, working with other
girls. There’ll be people you can talk to, and that should help.”

“Maybe,” Traci agreed. “If she lets you talk, that is. She may not let you talk or think about anything but diving and keeping
your hands flexed. It wouldn’t surprise me if she ran things like a prison.”

Valerie laughed. “Wow. You really don’t like her, do you?”

Traci shrugged, irritated. “What’s to like?”

“I see what you mean,” said Valerie, “but I wonder: Is being nice and sweet what you want in a coach? Don’t forget, Margo
has trained athletes who won Olympic medals. She must have
something
going for her to do that.”

“You can be a great coach and still be nice,” Traci pointed out.

“I wonder,” said Valerie. She started picking at Traci’s bedspread. “I mean, I agree that Jeff is a very nice guy. But how
many champions has
he
trained? Has he worked with any Olympic medalists?”

“Who knows?” Traci replied. “For all we know, he’s worked with top gymnasts.”

Valerie raised her eyebrows. “Oh, come on, Trace. If Jeff had worked with champions, you really think we wouldn’t have heard
about it in all these years? You think he’d have kept it a secret? I don’t believe it!”

Traci stared at Valerie. “It sounds to me like you aren’t so crazy about Jeff. Is that true?”

Valerie lowered her gaze and started picking at the spread again. She didn’t say anything for several seconds.

“Val? What is it?” Traci prodded.

Finally, Valerie looked up. “Don’t spread this around, but I’ve been thinking about finding a new coach.”

Traci’s eyes opened wide.
“Really?”

Valerie nodded. “I talked about it with my parents, and we have a few names we’re checking out. But I don’t want Jeff to know,
unless we’re actually going to make the switch.”

“That’s amazing,” Traci said.

“Not really,” said Valerie. “You know that I want to be a top gymnast. And if it takes some kind of hard-nosed type to get
me there… well, then that’s what I want. Athletes who win gold medals, or even silver or bronze medals, aren’t in it
just for fun.”

“When you put it like that,” Traci admitted, “it makes sense. But I really loved working with Jeff. I think it would be hard
to walk out on him, at least for me.”

Valerie shrugged. “I don’t believe that. I think you’re as ambitious as I am, and that you’d have done what I’m doing, sooner
or later. See, Trace, I think you caught a lucky break. I think the best thing Jeff ever did for you was to call Margo.”

When Traci didn’t answer, Valerie pressed her point.

“Here’s the way I see it. If you want to have a shot at being the best, you have to do whatever it takes. Maybe you can have
fun and maybe you can’t, but ‘fun’ isn’t what matters. You need to work with someone who will make you work hard, force you
to make the most of your talent. From what you’ve said, Margo is that kind of coach. That’s the kind of coach I want for myself.”

She laid her hand on her friend’s arm. “I’m ready to pay the price. You ought to decide if you are, too. Think about what
you really want.”

Valerie left a few minutes later. As Traci closed her bedroom door, she couldn’t stop thinking about what Valerie had said.

What did she really want?

T
raci arrived at the pool fifteen minutes early Saturday morning. Her second session was a lot like her first, though Margo
actually did have Traci do some diving—but only from the edge of the pool. She said Traci needed to work on getting more elevation,
more upward movement.

“I thought a springboard would do that for me,” Traci said at one point.

“You need to do it for yourself, too,” Margo replied. “Also, when you dive from a platform, there is no spring involved.”

Margo added one new item to Traci’s limited repertoire: a forward dive in the pike position. As usual, Margo had a thousand
little corrections for Traci to remember as she did the dive over and over. But, even though she found the repetition boring,
Traci realized that it helped her become more natural in movements that were new to her.

When Sophia arrived, she took Traci to do some more work on the mats and the trampoline. At the end of the session, Margo
gave Traci a piece of paper with an address written down on it.

“This is where you will be training from now on. Be there on Tuesday at four.”

“Is that the place where your divers work out?” Traci asked.

Margo gave one of her stiff nods. “You will be joining one of the groups on Tuesday. You’ll be working mostly with Sophia.
I will come in to observe from time to time.”

Traci was surprised to discover she was a little disappointed that she’d be working with Margo’s assistant rather than Margo
herself. But she comforted herself with the knowledge that Sophia was a nice woman who actually smiled and was willing to
give out a compliment now and then.

When Traci arrived for her session on Tuesday, she looked around her, thinking that this was more like it. There were three
big pools. The first two had diving
boards of different heights, from one meter, or just over three feet, above the pool, to three meters—almost ten feet—from
the water. The three-meter boards made Traci nervous; they seemed uncomfortably high.

When she looked at the diving platforms at the third pool, she felt dizzy. The three platforms were attached to an enormous
tower, with a staircase that went to the top. The lowest platform, which jutted out from the left side of the tower, was three
meters above the water. The next platform, projecting from the right side of the tower, was five meters up. The highest tower,
jutting from the middle of the tower, was
ten
meters up. Ten meters was over thirty feet. Diving off a ten-meter platform would be like diving off the roof of a three-story
building! Traci wondered how anyone ever had the nerve to do that. She doubted that she could ever get herself to dive from
up there, even for an Olympic gold medal.

“Traci! Welcome!” Sophia came over, smiling. “Ready to go to work?”

Traci liked Sophia’s attitude a lot more than Margo’s. She smiled back and answered, “Absolutely!”

“I’ll take you to the locker room and assign you a
locker,” Sophia said. “Then you can get into workout clothes and meet us in the workout room. Okay?”

“Not the pool?” Traci had hoped to do some diving today.

Sophia’s smile became apologetic. “Not today. We’re going to start with some introductory stuff. I’m afraid you won’t be getting
wet just yet.”

Traci hid her disappointment, reminding herself not to be impatient. She changed, then headed for the exercise room. This
was a large, brightly lit space with mats, a couple of trampolines, and bare floor, some of which was marked out in mysterious
patterns.

Sophia was there, along with about a dozen girls, who seemed to be between seven and nine years old.

“Come on over,” Sophia called. “Meet the other girls.”

The other girls?
thought Traci.
Is
this
the group I’ll be working with?

The girls were talking among themselves and eyeing Traci with curiosity. Sophia said, “Girls, this is Traci, a new student
here. She’ll be working with us for a while.”

Stunned, Traci barely managed to smile and say, “Hello.”

There was a chorus of hello’s and hi’s from the young girls, along with a few giggles. Sophia must have seen Traci’s confusion.
She said, “Listen, girls, you get started on your warm-ups. I’m going to show Traci around.”

Sophia gestured for Traci to go with her. The two walked across the room, where they could speak without being overheard.

“Uh…” Traci wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. “I was… I sort of thought… aren’t there girls here who are
my age?”

“Not at the moment,” Sophia said. “I mean, Margo works with girls of various ages. But the girls of your age or older who
work with Margo are experienced divers. The only ones who are relatively new to diving are the younger ones, like these girls
here. Actually, even
they
have some experience. I can see why it feels strange, but until you’ve got a foundation, you’re not ready to work with girls
of your own age. You’ll get used to it, and it won’t be forever. All right?”

It
wasn’t
all right, but Traci had to admit that
Sophia was making sense. Traci was a beginner, and she’d have to stick it out with these little kids—at least for now.

“Okay,” Traci said. “I know I’m new at this.”

“That’s the right way to look at it,” Sophia said. “Let’s get going.”

The class started out with ten minutes of stretching. This was standard routine for Traci: Keeping joints flexible was just
as necessary for a gymnast as it was for a diver. The little girls were as supple as the gymnasts Traci had worked with.

The group then went on to do a forty-minute calisthenic routine that left Traci breathing hard. Most of the younger girls,
Traci was surprised to see, seemed to be in better shape than she was.

Traci wasn’t sure whether this meant that divers generally needed to be stronger, or that Margo believed in working her people
harder than Jeff had done. She suspected that Jeff had been more easygoing, and wondered if this was a point for Jeff—or against
him. Traci remembered what Valerie had said about choosing between having fun and paying the price to get what you wanted.

Traci couldn’t help noticing a few of the girls staring
at her and whispering together. There was even a little giggling, although Sophia quickly put a stop to it and spoke sharply
to the girls involved.

Traci gritted her teeth. She could understand that the presence of an older, bigger girl in this group would appear weird
to these kids. At their age, she might have been one of the gigglers herself. Still, it bothered her. She resolved to work
as hard as she could so she could graduate to kids her own age.

After the workout, some girls went to work in a pool, while others practiced tumbling on the mats. A few high-school-aged
girls helped, spotting for the young girls.

Sophia called Traci over to a corner of the exercise room. In her hand she had a tape measure.

“Who are those older girls?” asked Traci.

“They’re some of Margo’s divers. They sometimes help out with this class. I need to take a few measurements of you.”

“For what?” Traci asked.

“You’ll see in a minute,” Sophia said, kneeling next to Traci. She measured both of Traci’s legs from knee to floor, and then
measured the length of her feet. She jotted down the measurements on a sheet
of paper. She did some arithmetic with a calculator and wrote down the results on the paper.

As she wrote, Sophia said, “Thanks to gymnastics, there are some things you won’t have to work on. Your posture is already
excellent, for one thing. A lot of girls just starting out don’t know how to stand. You do. But you’re going to have to spend
a lot of time on your approach and hurdle.”

Traci’s face must have showed that she had no idea what Sophia meant. Sophia smiled and wrote more things on another piece
of paper. When she was done, she showed the paper to Traci. On it was a line drawing of a long, oblong shape.

“That’s a drawing of a diving board,” Sophia explained. “When you do a forward dive off a board, you start from a position
toward the back of the board and take a few steps toward the end. That’s called the ‘approach.’ Then you take a kind of hop
off one leg—that’s what we call the ‘hurdle.’ You come down on both feet, flex at the knees, and take off into the dive.”

“How many steps?” asked Traci.

“It depends,” said Sophia. “First, you’ll decide which is your ‘drive leg’—the one you jump off for
the hurdle—and which is the ‘hurdle leg’—the one you swing upward in the hurdle. Then you’ll figure out whether you feel more
comfortable making the first step of your approach with your left or right leg.

“Let’s say you start your approach with your left leg and your drive leg is also your left leg. Then your approach will be
four steps: left, right, left, right, drive with your left—and into the hurdle. Which leg will you feel more comfortable driving
off for the hurdle?”

After walking through some imitation approaches and hurdles, Traci decided that she felt better driving off her right leg
and that she also liked starting her approach with her right leg.

“Okay, then you’ll use a four-step approach,” said Sophia, marking some lines on the paper outline of the diving board. “These
lines show you where your toes should be after each step of your approach. It’s based on the length of your leg and of your
foot—the measurements I just took. And notice that the last step—the one that leads into the hurdle—should be longer than
the first three steps, by about one third.”

“Wow!”
Traci said, looking at the paper. “It has to be that exact?” She looked at Sophia, wondering if this precision might be a
joke.

Sophia didn’t smile. “Yes, it has to be that exact.” She pointed to a painted outline on the floor. “That’s the outline of
a diving board. I’m going to tape off the four steps of your approach here so you can start practicing. You’ll need to make
an outline like this somewhere at home and tape off the steps on it, using these measurements. Then you can practice that
approach over and over, until you can do it in your sleep.”

Traci watched Sophia measure and tape lines on the floor. “I never realized that it had to be so precise.”

Sophia looked up at Traci. “Believe me, it does. Margo may seem picky to you right now, but that’s one reason she’s such a
good coach. She insists on perfection. Did you ever hear the expression ‘Practice makes perfect’?”