BY San Diego Union Tribune

The next big thing in U.S. diving is 4 feet 11¾ inches and weighs 95 pounds if you put her on the scale immediately after she emerges from the pool, dripping wet. She's also 15 and as recently as four years ago hadn't jumped off a 10-meter platform. Haley Ishimatsu hadn't for two reasons. One is that she was a gymnast. The other is that she's afraid of heights.

But like water flowing through cracks, elite athletes have a magical way of finding their true calling, either by design or by destiny. Ishimatsu and her older sister, Tory, were gymnasts from Seal Beach when a bad elbow injury forced Tory to find another sport. She chose diving.

Then Haley hurt her elbow and, tired of the nine-hour days in the gym and endless string of injuries, sought a sport with less pounding. She followed her sister to the pool.

Haley Ishimatsu is in Tijuana today and tomorrow for the FINA Diving Series at the Baja California High Performance Center. It is the first major international aquatics competition in Tijuana, and it features many of the medal favorites at this summer's Beijing Olympics. China is here. Russia is here. So are divers from Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Great Britain, Malaysia, Sweden and Mexico.

But before Ishimatsu could dream of learning how to translate her gymnastics skills to the pool, much less competing internationally, she had to jump off the 10-meter platform – the equivalent of a three-story building – for the first time. She climbed to the top, walked to the edge, peered at the shimmering water below and shook her head. No way.

For five minutes she stood there, until Tory climbed up, held her hand and jumped with her.

“It felt like I left my stomach up on the 10-meter,” Ishimatsu says. “Even now, if you ask me to jump off straight without diving a dive, I wouldn't do it. But if I'm doing a dive, I'm so focused on it that I don't think about it.”

Within a year she had medaled at junior nationals. The next year she was second at senior nationals behind Laura Wilkinson, the 2000 Olympic gold medalist who started diving the same year Ishimatsu was born. Now, after Haley Ishimatsu has spent only 3½ years in the sport, U.S. national coach Chen Wenbo is saying things such as:

“When she learns how to put all the dives together, I think she has a good chance to win an Olympic medal.”

“No,” Chen says, “I think she has a chance to win a medal in these Olympics (in August).”

Ishimatsu has yet to officially make the Olympic team, but she and Wilkinson are well positioned to claim the two U.S. platform spots. She also could qualify in synchronized platform diving with partner Mary Beth Dunnichay, who is 15 as well and will dive with her at the Tijuana event.

A fear of heights aside, Ishimatsu has several things going for her. She is small and flexible, making it easier to complete the various pikes and twists before splashdown. Her gymnastics background provides, in her words, “spatial awareness” as well as a willingness to train 7½ hours a day. Her family showed a willingness to move from Seal Beach to Indianapolis to work with Chen at USA Diving's national training center.

“She is moving up very fast,” says Chen, the national coach of China's vaunted national team before coming to the States in 1992. “She has great potential.”

Her signature dive is 207B in the dive list, or a back 3½ somersault pike with a whopping 3.60 degree of difficulty. Only a handful of the hundreds of possible dive combinations have more difficultly, and only two other women in the world – Wilkinson and a Chinese girl – are known to do it. Ishimatsu's high score on it is 88.20.

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