Saturday at lunch, I asked Alex if he was excited about his dive meet the next morning. He got a little evasive.

“Kind of.”

“Kind of? Why?”

“I’ve been having trouble with my front flip. I keep over-rotating.”

And he sounded genuinely sad about it. Please note that the front flip is Alex’s signature dive. He is the master of the front flip; it’s historically where he gets his highest scores.

“Then let’s go to the pool right after lunch. You can practice your dives.”

He perked right up. “Yeah – I’ll do front flip, one-and-a-half, front flip, one-and-a-half and do them each about a million times.” And off we went to the pool along with Alex’s Pop-Pop. The boy got to the diving board, tried his flip…he was right. He was over-rotating.

Here’s the thing. The next day Alex was in a dive meet, but he wasn’t competing against the other divers. He was in a class of his own trying to qualify for the Junior Olympics (JO). This means where the other divers were doing 3 dives, Alex would be doing 5. Herein came the problem.

Alex had recently learned to do a one-and-a-half. This is where he does a complete flip, then keeps rotating another 180 degrees until he goes into the water in a dive. This had screwed up everything. The front flip and the one-and-a-half had blended together. He rotated too far on the flip and too little on the one-and-a-half. Both dives were a mess.

“I don’t think I’m going to qualify,” he told me with he eyes down on his chest.

My Alex is not a creature of self-doubt, and to be honest this really concerned me. I was about to give him the old: “Of course you’ll qualify” in raucous Dad tone, but then I started doing the math. Alex had scored a 59 at the last meet and done 3 dives – plus he’d nailed all three. To qualify for JO he needed a score of 94. That meant he had to do even better.

“Look,” I told him, “if you don’t qualify, there’s another dive meet next weekend. You’ll have a whole week to practice for that.”

6AM my alarm went off. I made coffee and then went to wake up Alex.

“I’m so excited,” was the first thing he said, which I took to be a good sign. Maybe the self-doubt was gone.

We got him there for warm ups, but he was still over-rotating. He was getting closer to getting his front flip right, but he needed more time. However the damn line of kids warming up was just too long. I was pretty nervous for him.

Meet started, they got through the girls, then the boys, then Alex.

“Alex will be doing a front flip. Degree of difficulty: 1.4”

I hadn’t known the flip was first – we’d see real quick how things were going to go for our boy. Alex got up on the board, started his approached, in the air…

Perfect flip. Went in exactly right. I heard the gasp from his coach.

Scores:

I tried adding that up in my head, but I have deep doubts about my ability to accurately score a dive. Next up…

One-and-one-half. Degree of difficulty: 1.6. Up the boy went, whipped around and around and plunged into the pool in a dive.

Scores:

Back dive. Arced into the pool in a gorgeous descent.

Scores:

Inward. This one scares the shit out of me. The boy shot backwards and turned down to dive right into the water.

Scores:

Flip and half twist. This mother had a 1.7 degree of difficulty, which I knew was good for points. The higher the difficulty, the more points it’s worth. I found myself on my phone trying to calculate how close he was to the 94.5 he needed to qualify.

Alex got up, did his approach, into the air in a flip and twist.

Scores:

The final result:

If you missed it, his score was 130.85. And where my head is going…scholarship!