War Eagle Dive Club makes a brave splash in Auburn
For the past few years, the city of Auburn has not had a youth diving club. John Fox, the Tigers diving head coach, decided to change that this fall by starting War Eagle Dive Club along with Tigers diving assistant coach Drew Sheldon. Now the club is giving kids a new chance to be brave.
AUBURN, Ala. — Looking down at the water from high diving boards would scare a lot of people. But kids in War Eagle Dive Club jump right in.
“Every day, they always ask to go higher and higher and higher,” said Drew Sheldon, the War Eagle dive club head coach.
Even at their first practice.
“That’s been really cool, where they get that first feeling. It kind of brings me back to my first time too,” said Sheldon, a former diver at Davidson College.
Diving practice isn’t your typical pool day.
“I like going on the trampoline. I like diving and I like going off five meter,” said 7-year-old diver Isabela Jarvis.
Kayla Walsh, a sophomore diver at Auburn, said she enjoys the fearlessness of the kids — some as young as 5 years old.
“It’s fun for me, because I get up there and I have a lot of fear, because I’ve grown up and I’ve developed the sense of so many things that can go wrong,” she said. “But these kids are so open-minded and so ready to learn about it. That just makes me excited for them. And we have to actually learn how to contain that and control it. So I was working with Jack and keeping his arms by his side because he’s so excited, but I love that about them.”
Children like Jack are at the perfect age to learn. Similar to gymnastics, learning diving when young can be invaluable.
“The younger you are, the easier it is to learn all the fundamentals,” Sheldon said. “Then as you grow up, we can really build off those blocks of foundations to really have good body positions and air awareness and body awareness,”
As War Eagle Club divers train, they see lists of record holders and Olympians on the walls around them. This can creates dreams.
“It is always is a conversation with them,” Walsh said. “They just can look around here and just be like, ‘Oh, maybe I can do that one day.'”
“It makes me want to go all the way to the Olympics,” Jarvis said.
Even with the 2032 Olympics in mind, fear can still creep in.
“Thankfully, diving can be done from the side of the pool,” Walsh said. “So we start them really low, really basic. And you kind of gain that trust with them. We work on that mental toughness with them, and they can use that in the real world too.”
Because being brave isn’t about never being scared — it’s about doing things that scare you.
When asked if she gets scared, Jarvis paused, then smiled. “Not always, but sometimes,” she said. “If I’m scared, I just close my eyes and jump in.”
The War Eagle Dive Club currently has 11 divers in its program. Sheldon says with their state-of-the-art facilities and experienced coaching staff, the club has the ingredients to be something special.
