Swimming and diving may be a combined sport, but the scoring and overall execution of the two events vary greatly.

For Madison Freeman, head diving coach, her favorite part about coaching diving is “watching people get new dives … [and] in competitions succeeding at completing that dive to get a good score.”

Diving has several aspects that play into the scoring. These aspects include take off height, controlling the position of the body in the air, entry of the dive and the overall size of the splash.

The way dives are scored is a process of multiplying the scores of the judges by the degree of difficulty.

“If there are three judges, and they each gave a five, the score would be a 15; then they would multiply that dive by the difficulty rating,” Freeman said.

Judges for diving usually consist of the swimming and diving coaches. “Usually it’s just the coaches that are there,” Freeman said. “If it’s a bigger meet, they will draw numbers to decide the judges.”

To qualify for state in diving, there are specific degrees of difficulty and total scores a diver must achieve, each varying by gender and number of dives.

For example, at a six-dive meet boys must get an overall combined score of 190 with a degree of difficulty being a 10.7 while girls need an overall of 180 with a degree of difficulty of 10.2.

To achieve these state scores, divers warm up in a couple of different ways and practice their dives often.

“[The divers] do lots of gymnastics-style stuff to warm up and some stretches,” Freeman said. “Then it’s just repetition because it’s perfection; it’s based off one dive. You want it to be as consistent as possible.”

Freeman’s advice for aspiring divers is to “start by jumping off the board; get used to diving head-first. Diving is prettier when you go in on your hands.”