Boy strives for diving success

Max Davis climbs onto the three-meter board, pulling up his red Hollister swim trunks.
He slowly shifts toward the edge.

Sucking in his plump 10-year-old belly, he begins to raise his arms. 

In diving, there’s a penalty called a balk, or a false start, in which a diver steps forward to dive but then steps back, stalling to rethink the dive.

Max knows he’s balking. If this were a meet, he would be docked points.

For the next 30 seconds, he thinks about what could happen if the plunge doesn’t go as planned.

He could hit his head on the board.

He could clip his ankle, like he did while attempting a back dive a few weeks ago.

What if he lands in a belly flop, or what if his face hurts when it hits the water?
He inches backward, relaxing his muscles.

He waits.

* * *

Max is the youngest member in his diving club, the Indiana International School of Diving. He is one of two boys on the team, which trains divers up to age 17. 

His coach, 26-year-old Chris Heaton, competed in the 2012 Olympic diving team trials.
Heaton said it is rare for male divers to start training at an age as young as Max’s. Max has a stockier build than most divers, Heaton said, but once he grows into his frame, he could be great.

Max has only been diving for three months, after giving up football, tennis, soccer and swimming. He wanted to try a new sport, so he looked to his brother, Alex Davis.

Alex is a freshmen recruit on the IU nationally-ranked diving team. Max had watched his older brother’s diving meets since he was seven, so he decided to also give it a try.

Since there is no diving team in the Davises’ hometown of Terre Haute, Ind., Emeline Davis registered her son for the Bloomington club. She drives the hour and a half to the IU Outdoor Pool for Max’s three-hour practice three times each week.

Max’s math homework is in the backseat of the white SUV — sometimes, the drive to and from practice is the only time he has to work on assignments.

“It’s pretty exhausting,” he says. 

The zoned-in concentration for diving doesn’t always come naturally to Max. His mind is even more active than his body. He never stops asking his mother questions, whether it’s about science, his favorite subject, or cooking, his favorite hobby.

Emeline Davis sometimes wonders how her son manages to concentrate all of his thoughts and scattered energy on mastering one dive.

“Maybe it helps him to focus on one thing — it’s like a quiet in his life,” she says.

* * *

Max steps back a bit further on the three-meter board, holding his hands at mid-waist.  
His mouth drops slightly as he spots 14-year-old Alicia DeMars to his right on a board near his, executing what appears to be a perfect pike flip in her red and black one-piece swimsuit. 
 
Max doesn’t mind being the only boy in the pool most days, he says — he likes talking to the girls. His two favorites are Franny and Jordan, both about 15 years old, because they’re the ones who talk to him the most.

“He’s a stud muffin — a total stud,” his coach said.
 
He’s comfortable around the ladies, he says, but it doesn’t make him any less nervous on the board.

“I think about them watching me,” Max says.  “I’m thinking about a bunch of other things happening around me.”

He thinks about what his coach will say to him as he pops his head out of the water. Max has to do exactly what Heaton says. If not, he could hurt something, like his foot or his head.

“But I usually do better whenever my coach is talking to someone else ... when nobody else is watching me,” Max says.

Arching his back at the ledge of the board, he tries to forget about his audience.

He pretends he is alone — just him, the board and the water below.

He has already dived off the five-meter board twice. One time he even made a dive from the seven-meter platform, a board more than four times taller than him.

This one should be easy, he thinks to himself, closing his eyes.

He takes a deep breath, opens his eyes, and dives.

* * *

Sometimes Max pictures how Alex would form the same dive.
 
He sees his older brother at the edge of a board that’s even higher, in an arena with a much larger crowd.

He remembers watching Alex’s high school meets, running back and forth through the pool bleachers on his Heely’s roller shoes, shooting videos of his brother’s dives and texting them to him.

He thinks about the day when Alex first showed him how to reverse flip from the family’s staircase onto the beanbag chair in the living room.

Alex always seemed to make the dives look easy — almost as easy as snatching the best controller for playing Modern Warfare video games.

“If he does good on a dive, and I do bad on it, then I feel really mad,” Max said.
 
He knows he’s just getting started, but he already thinks he wants to compete in high school. He might want to be a college diver like Alex someday.

He’s getting his diving start much earlier than his brother, who didn’t pick up the sport until his sophomore year of high school.

Max’s coach thinks his head start could really help him in the long run. He could be as good as, or even better than, his brother.

Max thinks he’ll have a different style of diving than his brother, a different kind of splash. Max has a bulkier body structure — he’ll probably be a power diver someday, his coach said. 

Imagining Alex taking the plunge makes it feel a little bit simpler for Max.

“If he can do it, I can do it.”

* * *

In mid-air, Max creates an arc, keeping his back tight.

His body hurls forward into a somersault. He joins his hands, palms piercing the water.

It’s a matter of seconds leading to an unpredictable strike with the water. It could hurt, or it could be Max’s best dive yet.

Sometimes his coach uses physics to explain perfecting a fast, smooth dive.

During one practice he asked Max what he thought is the quickest way to get from point A to point B. The correct answer is a straight line; a diver needs to keep his body aligned to form a fluid dive.

But Max thinks there’s a faster way. What if he runs? What if he teleports himself, like in the movie “Jumpers”?

The science–lover asked his mother, “Wouldn’t the speed of light be the quickest way?”

“The quickest way is not the speed of light,” Emeline Davis told him. “It’s the speed of thought.”

Max’s body pierces the water in a vacuum, but it makes a bigger splash than he
expected.

He just didn’t keep his hands flat enough, he said.

He sticks his head out of the pool and grins at his coach.

“I’m getting better at it,” he says.

Follow reporter Samantha Schmidt on Twitter @SchmidtSam7.