What is Your Potential as a Diver?

If you are like me, you may always hear the word “potential” used in the same breath as athletics. What is your potential, or are you making the most of your potential.

But the question is … What is your potential?

Potential can be gauged in any number of ways, but one way to track how you are doing as a diver is by the numbers!

What do I mean by the numbers; simply stated, it is your total score at the end of a competition. If your scores improve, that generally means that you are getting better as a diver.

Track Your Progress with a Number

So how do you track this progress?

It is as easy as keeping track of your scores, but with one exception – take into account the number of dives in the contest and changes that occur as you do different dives with a higher or lower degree of difficulty.

In order to compare performances properly, you need to compare apples to apples, not apples to oranges. By taking into account changes in dive difficulty and the number of dives in a contest, you can compare apples to apples.

Different Dives and Meet Requirements

Not all diving meets are the same - some require eleven dives, some require six. And if you are looking to improve you will do different, and hopefully more difficult dives as you get better.

How do you account for these changes?

Theses changes can be tracked by using a simple formula that compares your score to the maximum score possible. This will give you a number that will an accurate comparison to be made.

To do this use a bit of simple math, dividing your score by the maximum score. The resulting number will reflect how close you have come to the "perfect meet." To make this easier, I always take that score and then multiply it by 100 and the result is a percentage of the maximum score.

To find the maximum score possible on your particular meet, you need to add the degree of difficulty of each your dives, and multiply that by the maximum score possible (30) on each dive. That number will tell you what you would score if you have the “perfect meet.”

Dual Meet Example

If you are competing in dual meet format with six dives, add the degree of difficulty from each of those six dives (lets use 13.4 as an example), and then multiply that number by 30 for a total of 402. Why 30, because if you received three scores of 10 from the judges, your total awards would equal that number.

After multiplying these numbers, you now have the maximum amount of points you can score when doing these six dives.

Now, take the points you scored in your contest (scores of 6 on all your dives would give a total of 241.2 - as an example), and divide that number by the maximum number of points you can score. So divide 241.2 by 402 with the result of 0.60. Now multiply that number by 100 and you have a percentage of the max score that you can track - 60.0.

The chart below demonstrates how this works by tracking scores for four meets, the last two of which have a higher degree of difficulty.

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