BY KC Community News

To be successful at competitive diving, one must have a combination of technique and the ability to put your fears behind you.

A group of girls from Raytown and Raytown South high schools are working hard to perfect the craft under the tutelage of first-year coach Jeremy Hall.

“Being a good diver is a combination of a lot of things,” Hall said. “I think the key is just letting yourself do the dive. These girls have the potential to do a lot more than they’re already doing. They just need to let themselves go for it.”

The girls’ fear was raised recently when South junior Danielle Boos injured herself as she was doing a backflip. Her foot hit the diving board on the way down, and, after curling up before entry, she hit her nose with her knee. She wound up with two black eyes and a broken nose that required surgery.

“They already get scared enough,” Hall said. “That made it that much worse.”

Raytown junior Mallory Mullally can relate.

“I’m coming back from a couple of fears from almost hitting the board,” Mullally said. “I’ve been there, done that, so I can totally understand what she’s going through. I almost hit my head doing a backflip at a meet last year. It was paper-thin. It’s taken me about a year to get it back.”

South junior Emmy Hall is Boos’ best friend.

“The hardest part is getting over the fear that you’re going to hit the board,” Emmy Hall said. “And it takes a while to get into the rhythm of technique. You can’t be afraid to do the crazy things coach tells you. It’s fun to learn your limit and how far you can push yourself.”

Scoring in diving is based on degree-of-difficulty, the height of the dive and distance the dive is done from the board, and the entry — the smaller the splash the better.

“Diving is 90 percent mental and 10 percent physical,” Mullally said. “You just have to overcome the mental part and keep telling yourself you can do it. You just kind of do what coach tells you and hope you can get it right.

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