Diving | Unlikely pair of Jumbo divers heads to nationals

Four and a half miles. Four stops on the T. An approximately 15-minute-long ride in the athletic van.

This is what separates Tufts' Hamilton Pool from MIT's Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center. The distance might not seem so significant at first. But multiply this trek by upwards of five times per week during the bitter Boston winter. Multiply it by four years of dedication and hard work.

Seniors Rob Matera and Lindsay Gardel are used to the Tufts-to-MIT journey at this point after four years on the Tufts diving team. Since Hamilton Pool in Medford does not have adequate diving facilities, for the last few decades, Tufts divers have been the nomads of the Boston collegiate diving scene, practicing first at Harvard and now at MIT's seven-year-old aquatics center.

For Matera and Gardel, two former gymnasts who arrived at Tufts in the fall of 2006 with relatively little diving experience, the transformation from talented freshmen to NESCAC champions has not always been smooth. But after four years of intense training, after thousands of acrobatic twists and somersaults have made being upside-down actually feel normal, the dynamic duo has emerged as two of the finest Jumbo divers in the history of the program. And this weekend, Matera and Gardel approach the culmination of their Tufts diving careers at the NCAA Championship meet in Minneapolis, Minn.

A gymnast on a diving board

Matera, who will graduate from Tufts this spring with a degree in biochemistry, recalls with a grin the story of how he ended up a Jumbo diver.

"I wasn't planning on diving at Tufts," said Matera, who grew up in Connecticut and spent up to 20 hours a week from the age of seven through high school training as a competitive gymnast.

"But in my application, in the extracurricular section, I had said that I won a diving meet in high school, and one of the admissions officers was an ex-swimmer and read my application and contacted [diving] coach [Brad Snodgrass], and was like ‘Coach, I didn't know you had this diver coming.' And coach told him, ‘I don't have any diver coming.'"

Snodgrass called Matera and asked the prospective freshman if he would be interested in joining the Tufts diving program. Matera agreed to give it a shot and arrived at practice in the fall with loads of raw acrobatic talent, but without the technical precision of a diving champion.

Snodgrass, a coach of both MIT and Tufts' diving teams for the past 22 years, saw Matera's potential and immediately went to work. For Snodgrass, who has coached national champions at both Tufts and MIT and has been honored as NCAA Diving Coach of the Year in 2005 and 2008, this task was an intriguing challenge.

"There is no comparison [between Rob as a freshman and now as a senior]," Snodgrass said. "I hadn't even met him until he showed up at practice the first time. He did dives like a gymnast because he was a gymnast, and he was doing dives that looked like a gymnast's floor routine."

As a freshman, Matera was unable to complete a "back 1.5," which in diving lingo means launching oneself off the board facing backwards, doing one and a half somersaults and ultimately making a headfirst entry into the water. While for more experienced divers the back 1.5 is a simple move, Matera — who had managed in high school to often win by finishing his dives mostly feet-first — had years of gymnastics programming which told him: If you want to survive, do not land on your head.

"The [back 1.5] is a particular problem for gymnasts because now we have to teach someone who is used to landing on their feet how to hand on their head, someone who used to avoid like the plague landing on their head," Snodgrass said.

The method Snodgrass uses for teaching new dives requires a level of trust between player and coach that sometimes takes years to develop, but Matera didn't have that kind of time. To learn the back 1.5, a diver jumps off the board and enters his "tuck", with knees clenched to chest. The diver keeps his tuck tight until the coach yells for him to release and make an entry into the water.

Only a few months earlier Matera had doubted whether he even wanted to dive at the collegiate level, and now he was being asked to put his wellbeing in the hands of a coach whom he had just met a couple of days before. Yet Matera committed himself to improving his technique, and over time, he has developed into a formidable performer on the board.

"Brad completely re-taught me how to dive," Matera said. "When I came to Tufts, I couldn't do a back dive, any of the dives that I do now, couldn't do a headfirst entry. Coach took me down, took all my diving away and then built me back up. That's all Brad."

For the third consecutive year, Matera is one of 22 divers selected for the Div. III NCAA Championships, held this weekend in Minneapolis. Matera's biggest asset as a diver is his ability to do dives with a high degree of difficulty (DD); while he entered Tufts hesitant to land headfirst, now his repertoire includes some of the more difficult dives in the sport. Raw talent has been converted into silky fluidity: Matera can now not only land on his head but can also — in what is known as a "reverse 1.5 with 2.5 twists" — flip backwards 1.5 times while at the same time twisting 2.5 times, and then land headfirst, without a second thought.

Taking an acrobatic path

Gardel grew up in Wayland, Mass., where she also was a youth gymnast. When Gardel's hometown gym closed down during her seventh-grade year, she and her identical twin sister Melissa tried many sports before settling on diving during freshman year of high school.