I was a fish out of water. In over my head. Tossed into the deep end. (Feel free to insert your own favorite water-based cliché here). I was sitting in the bleachers at the Mission Viejo Aquatic Center, taking in the USA Diving National Championship Prelims, and I was the only uninformed member of the “crowd”.

Every 30 seconds or so, in front of me a young male or female would bound off of a springboard, contort themselves in mid-air and somehow (most of the time) straighten themselves out for a hands-first entry into the water. This would be followed by a mysterious authoritative voice emanating from…well, from somewhere I couldn’t see, reading off a set of five scores. This had been going on continuously for almost 90 minutes now.

Everyone else in attendance quite obviously knew their diving, because they saved any applause whatsoever for the truly impressive dives – and didn’t have to wait for the scores to be announced in order to identify and reward the special ones. This was usually done with a nod and a knowing glance at those around them. Yours truly was never the recipient of either a nod or knowing glance.

But I was coming up to speed rapidly.

Lulled into a daze by the repetitive rhythmic nature of the competition and the sunny brilliance of the day, I had morphed into a dive-judging savant. Even though I was so relaxed I feared I might start to drool at any moment, I began scoring dives frighteningly close to the numbers that wafted out of the P.A. system after each splash (or lack thereof). I was becoming the Rain Man of diving.

Just then, the assembly line of women divers came to an abrupt end and the female Wizard of Diving voice informed the divers that the 3-meter boards were open for practice, the top 12 divers would begin the final competition in 45 minutes, and their names would be “posted”. Over on the 1-meter boards, the men continued to cycle through their dives to the drone of the male Wizard of Diving.

I took this opportunity to start asking questions. A couple of young ladies who were clearly in the know about competitive diving were sitting not far from me, so I ran my theories about how this whole thing was being scored by them. One of the girls was actually a diver for the University of Texas, there to lend moral support to a friend while awaiting her turn for a subsequent competition.

She was very sweet and patiently answered my questions, but since I am not fluent in either Dive Speak or 21-Year-Old College-Girl-Speak, my full comprehension was lacking. It was kind of like asking someone for directions – after processing the first couple of turns, everything else becomes a random collection of word parts. “Well, you take a left onto Main Street, and then when you get to the Chevron station you go right onto Carter Road. You’ll come to a fork in the road and you want to keep to the left, and follow kashmulsh ilt orgjilish regnad kcin…”

I thanked her for her help and scribbled down what I thought she had described about how they were going to tease out a winner from the endless tangle of numbers that were still floating around in the air. Then, armed with that sketchy “knowledge”, I approached the inner sanctum of the scoring tent to run it by an official.

Based on the look on her face, I’m not sure that the woman that I talked to had ever encountered a real live, uninformed Sports Fan in its natural habitat before. But she warmed to the task and eventually filled in the blanks for me. What I learned was this…

Everyone in the competition has to perform the same number of dives – five for women and six for men. The total body of work for each diver must include certain dive elements comprised of variants on how they take off (facing frontwards vs. facing backwards), what they do while in the air, and how they enter the water (facing toward the board vs. facing away from it). The divers plan out in advance what specific dives to do, and in what order to do them, and submit that program to the officials prior to the festivities.

And here’s where it gets tricky – each dive performed carries with it a Degree of Difficulty. To calculate an official score for each dive, the total of the scores awarded by each of the five judges is multiplied by the “DD” number specific to that dive. This calculation is done for each subsequent dive, and added on to a running total – eventually yielding one single score per diver for the competition. The top twelve total scores go on to the Finals, where they do it all over again from scratch. I’m pretty sure.

This explained the most puzzling part of the day to me – why the same dive was rarely performed by two competitors in a row. I suppose the current process adds competitive strategy and flexibility to the event, but if you ask me, I would much rather see everyone do the same dive in succession. That way I’d have some sort of comparative framework within which to assess the whole thing.

When I asked the official why it wasn’t done this way, I could tell she was starting to calculate the exact point at which it was appropriate to call Security. If she had been a bank teller, the silent alarm button would no doubt have been pushed. But hey! I’m a fan!!! Isn’t it all about ME?

No? OK then I’ll just go back and sit quietly in the bleachers again. Thanks ever so…

The Finals were nothing short of dazzling, as the Top 12 divers brought out the best in each other. I had been thinking for the previous two hours that the highest available score was a “7”, but each of the first two competitors executed dives that drew a couple of “7 ½”s interspersed within their roster of scores – and it wasn’t long before I heard the number “8” announced. It was definitely Game On.

In the men’s competition from the 1-meter springboard, two divers quickly separated themselves from the pack: Brandon Watson, from BYU and the Mountain West Dive Club; and Matt Culbertson, who dives for SMU. Watson eventually prevailed with a total of 340.10 to Culbertson’s 332.15. By comparison, the next highest score was less than 300.

As for the women’s 3-meter springboard competition, a mere 3.55 points wound up separating the top three divers. Ariel Rittenhouse of USC and the Trojan Dive Club took first place over 16-year-old Cassie Weil from Beaverton, Oregon’s Tualatin Hills Dive Club, and Dayne Christensen, another Brigham Young University diver.

But there was one question that remained – how many divers would be advancing on to next month’s AT&T National Diving Championships in College Station, TX? Just the winners? The top three? The Wizards of Diving were less than forthcoming with this information.

Normally I would have asked someone in the know, but I’ve got a pretty good feeling that they had already started a dossier on me at USA Diving HQ, so I decided not to push my luck. I quietly slipped off my water wings and headed for the car.