Despite a somewhat remarkable turn-around season, Ohio's divers have been overlooked all season.
When people talk about swimming and diving, it’s as if they don’t hear the second part.
Even when both are in competition, most call the event a "swim meet," not "swim and dive meet," despite both of the teams' scores being counted together to determine a win or loss.
Case in point: Ohio’s divers are amidst a turn-around season and not many have noticed.
"I've been diving for eight years now, so being in the minority sport is something I'm used to," Haleigh Bartlett, a fifth-year senior, said.
Last season, the Bobcats were down to just one competitive diver after Bartlett suffered an undisclosed injury and another diver quit the team, and school altogether. Karrisa Conner is the one diver who stayed. Conner is a sophomore from Granite Bay, California.
On top of that, former diving coach Russ Dekker, who coached the Bobcats for 11 years, left Athens to take a job at Buffalo. Dekker was awarded the Mid-American Conference Diving Coach of the Year in 2014.
“It was hard,” Bartlett, a Cuyahoga Falls native, said. “We went through a lot of adversity.”
Now, a year later, the Bobcats have four divers on their team and freshman Olivia Dillon and Bartlett have qualified for NCAA zones.
Bartlett has broken multiple records, including Ohio's one-meter record, as the Bobcats' divers look like a completely new squad from a year prior.
Even head swimming coach Rachel Komisarz-Baugh has noticed the improvement on the diving side, calling Dillon's performances this season "phenomenal."
Yet, the swimmers still dominate the headlines.
“Even though I am doing well, I’m not getting the recognition that a swimmer would get," Bartlett said. “Ohiobobcats.com even said that I was MAC Swimmer of the Week instead of MAC Diver of the Week."
But, Bartlett said she is used to being in the “minority sport” and she chooses to make light of the situation.
“It’s been an ongoing joke with all my friends and family for them to ask me, ‘Oh, what swimming events do you do?’ And I’m like ‘all of them,’" Bartlett said.
Diving coach Chelsea Ale said the prominence of swimmers over divers has “just been the way it’s always been.” However, the concept has never made much sense to her.
Ale said what divers do is much more aesthetically pleasing, but the swimming events are easier to follow because “you can always tell who’s winning.”
Part of the issue is that there is not enough participation in diving, Ale said.
“I think people like the sport of diving, but it’s just a lot harder to actually be good at it,” Ale said. "You can have a lot of friends that play on their boards, but if you actually want to compete at it, it takes a lot of practice and hard work and I don’t think people want to put in that amount of work.”
The diving team practices six days a week and competes on weekends. Ale said the team also has "dry land" practices, which are workouts outside of the pool.
With the gap in interest, it could be easy for there to be animosity among Ohio's swimmers and divers. But Ale and Komisarz-Baugh work closely together to make sure that doesn’t happen.
“If there is a segregation within the team, that doesn’t make for a great environment,” Komisarz-Baugh said. “You have to cultivate a culture that everybody has part in what we do.”
Bartlett said the swimmers and divers began the academic year by helping the incoming freshman of both sides of the team move in to the dorms.
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Komisarz-Baugh said the divers and swimmers treatment of each other is a trickle-down effect of how the coaches treat each other.
For Ohio diving to get the extra attention it deserves, the sport as a whole must take a positive step.
“The Olympics does a really good job with (marketing),” Ale said. “With diving, after the Olympics, you’ll notice people say, ‘Oh i wanna try that!’ But, because it’s only every four years, people get excited about it for a year, and then it dies off again."
The divers may not get the "hype" they deserve but they warrant just as much attention and recognition for their hard work as other athletes, Komisarz-Baugh said.
But the Bobcats don't let it get to them and that stems from Ale.
“The divers just have to remember they’re doing it for themselves, and then by doing it for themselves they’re also scoring points for the team,” Ale said. “But, they can’t look it as, ‘Oh, well no one cares about us.' ”
- Trevor Colgan attributed to this report.
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