Have you ever heard of the Super Five?
If you follow basketball you might have heard of this, it lists the top five high school hoops players in the nation.
This list comes out every year in May and is chosen by the staff at the Courier Journal in Louisville, Ky. Since I live in Kentucky where basketball is king, you get a great deal of basketball press (a good thing if you like basketball as I do), but it does overshadow the many sports that do not get much publicity.
Diving's Super Five
So how do these deserving athletes get the attention they deserve. Well, what better place to start than at About.com! And since basketball has its "Super Five," why shouldn't diving have its own acknowledgement of the top prep divers in the nation - a Super Five (or ten) for diving.
Now of course, the "five" refers to the number of basketball players that compete on the floor at one time, but the number seems appropriate so I decided to stick with it. And since the girls are as deserving as the boys, the number doubles to ten.
What is the Criteria?
How did I pick the top five, or ten? I would like to take all the credit but the list is chosen by a group of coaches who score and rank divers that submit applications for high school All-American status for the National Interscholastic Swimming Coaches Association, otherwise known as NISCA.
All the divers are independently scored once, and then the top ten or so divers are scored again producing a mythical high school champion. One aspect of this ranking is that the public never knows who finished in the top five - that is until now!
What is the End Game
If you look at the basketball athletes, most of the high school basketball superstars are either in the NBA, or what they call one and done - in other words they spend one year in college and then it is off to the pros.
In the case of diving, the NBA or one and done equivalent is an NCAA championship or a berth on the Olympic team. So look for these talented divers to top the list at the NCAA championships in the future, or maybe even an Olympic Games.
The List
My apologies to for the lateness of the 2009 Diving Super Five, but since I conceived the idea in 2010, I didn't really have much choice.
So here are the Diving Super Five from 2009 in alphabetical order, and look for the 2010 version in mid-June.
Girls Super Five
- Kaylea Arnett - Junior (Spring High School/Spring, Texas)
- Tori Lamp - Senior (Bearden High School/Knoxville, Tenn.)**
- Kendall McClenney - Freshman (Woodlands High School/Woodlands, Texas)
- Samantha Pickens - Junior (Franklin Regional High School/Murraysville, Penn.)
- Maren Taylor - Senior (Yorktown High School/Arlington, Va.)
Boys Super Five
- Alan Dickey Jr. - Senior (Kennedy High School/Waterbury, Conn.)
- Ryan Hawkins - Junior (East Gaston High School/Charlotte, N.C.)
- Kristian Ipsen - Sophomore (De La Salle High School/Clayton, Calif.)**
- Connor Kuremsky - Sophomore (North Allegheny High School/Wexford, Penn.)
- Ford McLiney - Sophomore (Rockhurst High School/Kansas City, Mo.)
**High School National Champion