Abby Johnston concentrates on the music playing from her headphones as she prepares to jump three meters from a springboard into 18 feet of water in Austin, Texas.
It’s the third of her six dives, her hardest dive, and although it’s been in her repertoire for years, it’s still the biggest hurdle in her program. Earbuds removed, she steps up on the board and waves to her mother, as she does before every dive. She jumps, then falls.
Three and a half somersaults later, she hits the water. When she re-emerges above the surface, she’s not sure how it went. She looks to Drew Johansen, who has coached her since she was 12 years old and transitioning from gymnastics to diving. Johansen’s reaction will tell her everything she needs to know. She’s used to getting a relatively mild cheer, just a simple double fist pump. But she can tell right away this fist pump is bigger than usual.
She’s scored a 69.75 for the dive, her second-highest score of the day and the best by any diver in this round. Her lead is intact, and she’s well on her way to the first NCAA championship in Duke women’s aquatics history.
She had dreamed of that moment for years, ever since she first enrolled at Duke. But this was no dream, and she had led the three-meter springboard event from start to finish at the NCAA championships, en route to a final score of 409.35 and a national title.
Preliminaries for the event started off on a rocky note, as her first dive netted her just 49.5 points to put her in 22nd place, distant from the top-eight finish she would need to proceed to the finals.
“I was a little cautious in the morning, and didn’t start off on the right foot,” she said.
But a strong final dive, the best of the sixth round, scored her over 70 points and vaulted her into fifth place and on to the finals.
In the finals she was determined to start on a good note. Her first dive is the one she’s most comfortable with, and she planned to use it to get her championship efforts off to a strong start.
“If she really hits it, then she’s in position to go wire-to-wire like she did,” Johansen said. “And her consistency is so high on it that even when she doesn’t do it perfectly, it still keeps her in the mix to be one of the top performers.”
And hit it she did, scoring a pair of nines and four 8.5s from the panel of judges. It earned her 76.5 points and put her in the lead right out of the gate. She had no intention of looking back from there.
“To hit that first dive so well, I just knew it was all going to fall into place,” she said.
The confidence she gained from her first dive set the tone for the rest of her program, which she performed with outstanding consistency: no score below 63, and no worse than fourth place in any of the rounds.
“All the technique in the sport kind of goes out the window,” Johansen said. “She became a performer.”
She knows she wouldn’t have performed nearly as well without the coach whom she calls a “second father.” Johansen’s hiring at Duke after Johnston’s junior year of high school led Abby to move from Ohio to Durham and finish high school online. The coach’s guidance and encouragement have developed more than just Johnston’s diving technique. The life that she’s discovered at Duke outside of diving has also helped her keep her focus in the pool.
“I used to put a lot more pressure on myself, and be a lot more upset if I didn’t do as well in diving,” she said. “Coming to Duke [has made] the failures in diving less significant because if I had gone to NCAAs and gotten last, boo hoo, bummer, I still have biology class on Monday…. I’ve really figured out the other things in my life that I want apart from diving, and that has enhanced my diving career.”
Her diving career is hardly slowing down, however, as she’s set her sights higher even than to repeat as an NCAA national champion next year. Her “ultimate dream” is to make the 2012 Olympic team. To do that, she’ll need a top-notch performance at the FINA World Aquatics Championships in July in Shanghai, China. But her accomplishments to this point make her a leading candidate to represent the U.S. in London in 2012.
For now, though, the NCAA title will do.
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