Arizona Part 1 - Coaching

As some of you may know, I just returned home from a 10 day trip to Arizona. The purpose of the trip was primarily for me to be able to attend JO and Age Group Nationals for Diving. The meet was being held at the University of Arizona where I went to school and was being hosted by my old coach Michelle Mitchell.

I was a little nervous to be going out to Arizona and especially for so long seeing that I was about 34 weeks pregnant when I left. Luckily my body seemed to hold up just fine and there were no signs of early labor. Of the 10 days in Arizona, 9 were spent at the pool coaching, at least 6 of those days were 12+ hour days, and all of them were in 90-100 degree heat. So it is pretty amazing that my body was able to hold up the entire trip, although by day 9 it sure felt like it was ready to give out and I was more than ready to return home on day 10.

To give you an idea of what I was doing I will take you through a typical day. Most days I needed to be at the pool around 7am, some days a little earlier and some a little later. My mom's house is about a 30-40 minute drive so I was usually up around 5:30am. When I arrived at the pool I would coach our divers for about an hour, 30 minutes dry land and 30 minutes in the water. At 8:30am those divers in the first events would have a warmup and I'd do some more coaching. Events started at 9am and went all day. I would spend the rest of the day going back and forth between coaching and judging, and sometimes both at once. Once the days events were over I would help coach an evening practice for those divers in the next days events, this usually ended around 8pm and I would hopefully be home by 9pm. Of course there were a couple of days where I was able to leave after prelims because we didn't have any divers in finals, but I think I would have rather had the divers make finals and have to stay the whole day.

Overall it was a very good experience. I got a LOT of judging experience and I got to watch some of the best coaches in the country in action. It was also great to see all the best age group divers in the country and see how our divers compared. I'm hoping to use all that I saw and learned to help evaluate my coaching in order make our divers better in the future. Also, some of our divers didn't dive as well as they had hoped to and I'm hoping that being at this meet I will be able to better prepare them for future meets.

Here are a couple of lovely pictures my mom snapped of me at the pool - 35 weeks pregnant!