New To Diving

Practice makes perfect! This is true of any sport (or endeavor in life) but in diving this consists not only of diving into the water, but most importantly and less obvious, is the absolute necessity of dryland training.

Dryland

Dryland training is used to prepare divers for water practice and to minimuze injury. Conditioning, flexibility and strength are critical to proper and safe diving techniques. During dryland practice the diver will focus on these activities as well as gymnastic type flips and twists. The diver will also use a trampoline with a spotter and a dryboard to practice tricks before trying them in the water. This helps to minimize the risk of "smacking" or, in layman's terms, belly-flopping!

Line-ups

When first learning the sport of diving one may wonder why so much time is spent jumping or falling straight into the water. These dives, called line-ups, teach the necessary body control for performing more difficult dives as well as the correct body position for the end of every dive that will be learned. Once line-ups are reasonably controlled, adding tricks becomes safer and a lot more fun because the diver is less likely to get injured.

Guide For Parents

"Coaches and divers recognize the success of age-group diving is dependent on parents' willingness to invest time and money in a program. But parents are the one element in a diver's development that is outside the coach's control and these observations are presented with that in mind."
Excerpt of article from Rip Magazine --- Parents Guide to the Fun and Games of J.O. Diving

Dive Lists and Numbers

When someone describes a dive it is usually in terms such as front flip, double, back flip, etc. If that person comes from a gymnastics background they would even use the terms gainer (a reverse in diving) and twister. All sports have terms the general public uses and then terms that are used for scorekeeping. The same is true in diving and can be quite daunting the first time a dive list must be created for a competition.

When competing a diver must have a "dive list." This is used when signing-up for a meet as well as by the judges and announcers during the competition. This list contains each dive to be performed in the order it will be performed. For identification purposes each dive is defined by a unique number and letter instead of a word description. The number of and types of dives required for the list is determined by the meet, the gender of the diver and, for junior competitions, the age of the diver. (An outline can be found on the Competition page.) Each dive also has an associated Degree of Difficulty (DD) which is used as part of the the award calculation. To understand how the dives are identifed the following is a basic tutorial. (For rules and understanding DD, see the USA Diving website)

Every dive is grouped and given a specific 3 or 4 digit number, followed by a letter. 4 digit dive numbers always represent twisters.

There are 6 Dive Groups:

There are 4 Flight Positions:

For instance a 405B would be an Inward dive with 2 and 1/2 Somersaults in the Pike position.
 (More commonly called an inward two and half pike.)

The first digit in the number represents the dive group. For groups 1 to 4, the second digit is zero for all dives except for those classified as flying, in which case it is a 1. The 3rd digit represents the number of half rotations that will be performed in the dive. For Groups 5 and 6 the second digit denotes what direction the dive will move, the third digit tells the number of half rotations, and if there is a forth digit, it represents the number of half twists. Finally the letter at the end denotes the flight position in the dive. Each dive also has an associated Degree of Difficulty (DD).

A complete list of dives and their associated DD's can be found in the FINA DD Tables.

Scoring

Note:

This is the FINA (Fédération Internationale de Natation) judging scale. High School and College competitions use a slightly different scale, with high school being the most tolerant.

The score considers 3 elements of the dive: the approach, the flight and the entry. The primary factors considered are the height from the board the diver achieves in the air, the distance from the board during the dive, the proper body position throughout the dive, the correct number of rotations or twists and the angle of entry into the water. For an armstand dive, the length of time the armstand is held, which demonstrates control of the armstand, is also taken into account.

Each dive is scored by a minimum of 3 judges. To determine the award the 3 middle scores are added together and then multiplied by the DD of the dive. For instance, if there were a 5 judge panel which scored a 2.4 DD dive at 5.0, 5.5, 5.5, 4.5 and 6.0, the top score of 6.0 and the bottom score of 4.5 would be discarded. The final award would be 16 x 2.4 which equals 38.4.

For a good layman's tutorial on the sport of diving, visit Diving on Wikipedia.

Also be sure to check out the USA Diving website for more resoursces and specifically Diving 101