Hey swimmers, athletic directors and other athletes; our sport actually matters! Diving can be overlooked because we appear so graceful, but there is a lot of strength and endurance hidden behind the gracefulness that you don’t see. Diving always gets the short end of the stick, and here are some reasons why you shouldn’t overlook our sport or how hard we work.

1. We work just as hard as any other athlete.

We practice, practice, practice. We weight lift and do dry land conditioning. We have offseason and dive 365 days a year. Oh, and your ab conditioning is nothing compared to ours.

2. We need spatial awareness.

Sometimes we’re nuts and go off the boards facing forward but end up somersaulting backwards. We spin many times, and we have to be able to know when to come out. If you’re crazy and don’t keep your eyes open like me, diving teaches you spacial awareness of where you are in the air and when to come out to the position so you hit the water just right. For the divers who are smart enough to keep their eyes open and spot, they have to learn that when they see a specific marker, they need to change their body position in a split second.

3. We have trained our brains to multitask.

Diving is more complex than a lot of sports. Soccer is neat, but you run around kicking a ball; you think about where you have to go, look who is open and move your feet. But diving is much more difficult than that. We have to think about our pace of our steps, the distance of steps, the arm swings, raising our leg to a perfect 90 degree, riding the board, arm circling at the right point, waiting for the board and keeping our head up — and that’s just the approach. Within the dive you have to think about your body positioning, your pointed toes, your squeezed butt and abs, you have to spot directions with your head, know when to come out of the position and do this all with a minimum splash and a safe distance as close to the board as possible.

4. We are fearless.

Some of us stick to one meter. Some of us are brave enough to go up on three meter. Some wild even go higher than that, all the way up to 10 meter platform. Every time we get on the board, we face fear. We look down at the water and sometimes it’s a long ways away. We are fearless diving off the board in the first place, and we are fearless when it comes to trying new dives.

5. When we mess up, we get back up and try again.

Diving is all about trial and error. No dive will ever be 100 percent perfect, and that’s just reality. We get up on a board, try our hardest and sometimes we end up smacking our faces on the water very hard (resulting in beautiful bruises). This doesn’t happen every once and a while; it happens every practice. We get back up on the board and try again and again.

If this doesn’t convince you that divers deserve a little more credit than what we get, then I suggest you get up on a board and try doing what we do.