Waves ripple across the pool as senior diver Johnathan Guan stands on the diving board. He dives headfirst into the serene water, twisting through the air, mastering technique, precision and skill. The scoreboard flashes. Another dive was mastered, and another record was reached.
After two years of swimming, Guan first started diving last year at the beginning of the swim season. The switch was suggested by Swim and Dive coach Dan Vanderjeugt.
“I was in Varsity Physical Education (VPE) when the head swim coach came up to me with the proposition. I was a swimmer before I was a diver and he came up to me and said, ‘I’ll bring you up to varsity as a sprinter, and I want you to try diving,’ and I found out I was really good at diving. I switched from swimming and diving to just diving around a month into the season,” Guan said.
Vanderjeugt believed Guan’s skills as a gymnast would transfer over to diving.
“I was watching him in the gymnastics room, and I watched his twisting and flipping, and I knew that he’d be good on the board,” Vanderjeugt said.
Guan’s transition to diving involved doing flips in the air before entering the swimming pool, similar to gymnastics, as opposed to simply jumping in the water as he did when he was a swimmer. Though swimming and diving are technically part of the same team, they are separate sports.
This year, Guan and his team have had a stream of successes. The swim and dive team became conference champions for the first time in school history, with Guan being a diving champion. The team also qualified for state, where Guan was seeded 24th and placed 34th.
To prepare for competitions, Guan goes through intense preparation in team practices.
“I stretch and warm up for about 30 minutes, and in practice itself, I just dive. I do every dive I do three times over, and that’s my entire practice. There’s five different categories [of dives]. There’s fronts, which is where you’re going forward and you front flip, backs which is when you’re facing towards the boarding and you go back flip. Inwards is when you’re facing towards the board and you do a front flip towards the board; it’s like a front, except you’re doing a backflip in the air, and the fifth and final category is twisters. It can be one of each category from one through four, and you do a flip and a twist; it’s like a front flip while you’re spinning,” Guan said.
Guan outlines the specific scoring criteria judges used to evaluate him.
“So how it works is your dive is given a degree difficulty based on how hard it is, and the judges score you one through ten on everything from how you look on the board, how you look in the air, how you enter the water and overall how clean you were. They take the score from three judges, add it together and multiply by the degree of difficulty,” Guan said.”
Guan’s teammate and best friend, senior Muhamed Alali, admires him for his leadership on the team.
“Johnathan is an amazing teammate and captain. He inspires everyone around him to be the best version of themselves by not only encouraging the team with speeches but also by setting that example himself. He works incredibly hard and shows how that hard work can pay off. Also, Johnathan just makes it fun to be on the team. He has a great attitude and just makes the swim team a really positive environment,” Alali said.
Guan enjoys the support he gets from his teammates as well, especially during competition.
“My favorite thing is just the support I get from all the swimmers. Whenever I get on the board, a lot of swimmers cheer very loudly, they’re very supportive of my diving and just my progress in general,” Guan said.
