Wood Towers Over Other Junior Diving Competitors

Ricky Wood stands poised atop the tower more than 30 feet above the ground at the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center, then plummets toward the blue, placid water, his body twisting and spinning. He knifes into the pool with hardly a splash.

Wood performed this two-and-a-half somersault dive again in July during the National Junior Olympic championships in Clayton, Mo., and won the platform title in the 16-18 age-group division.

It was his ninth title in the national age-group meet.

Wood, 18, is competing now in the Age Group World Championships in Orebro, Sweden. He dived in that event four years ago, and won a silver medal on the platform in the 13-14 division. The competition, held in Oslo, was his lone previous try outside North America.

“I’m feeling really good going into the world championships,” Wood said. “I know there will be a lot of competition that I’ve faced only once in my life. I can’t remember how it was, but I know it will be tough.”

Wood, of Simi Valley, has won numerous awards while working his way through the junior ranks. In addition to his Junior Olympic titles, he has won three medals against international age-group competition and about 150 other awards at local meets. But it’s back to square one in January when he turns 19 and must dive at the senior level.

“I’m back on the bottom of the barrel,” said Wood, who has been competing against juniors since he was 6. “I have to grow up and start training harder.”

He’ll need to mature quickly. Next week, during the U.S. Diving National Championships at Bartlesville, Okla., he will be facing formidable opposition.

The list of competitors includes Kent Ferguson, this year’s three-meter springboard world champion; 1988 Olympians Mark Bradshaw (three-meter) and Patrick Jeffrey (platform); and rising star Mark Lenzi, the one-meter champion in the Pan American Games.

It will be Wood’s third appearance in the Nationals, open to qualified divers of all ages. He finished 14th in the 10-meter platform event at the Nationals in 1990.

Van Austin, who has coached Wood for 12 years, said his protege will need to change his repertoire before he can compete with the nation’s elite divers. Austin, the diving coach at UCLA and formerly at Cal State Northridge, expects Wood to finish between 12th and 20th.

“With his current list of dives he’s doing now--and he does his entire list very well--he’s capable of finishing first or second in a Junior Olympic meet, will do fairly well at an international junior meet and place in the middle or lower echelon of senior competition,” said Austin, who has coached 31 junior national champions. “That’s all he can expect and that’s all I can expect.”

To reach the upper echelon of seniors, Wood will need to increase the degree of difficulty of his dives, according to Austin. The difficulty of a dive is determined by the number of twists and somersaults, and whether the dive is performed on the one-meter, three-meter springboard or platform.

“My highest (degree of difficulty) is 2.9 off the springboards and 2.5 off the platform,” Wood said. “I need to change everything to a 3.5.

“You need that to compete with the Chinese and the Russians because they’re so good,” he said. “I need to learn a lot of new dives and work on them as hard as I can. Basically that means starting from scratch.”

Wood began his diving career when he was 6, at the Holiday Health Spa in Chatsworth. Austin coached a diving team there and Wood watched practices while his father lifted weights. Once he proved that he could swim, Wood received permission to try out.

“I was doing nothing but sitting around,” Wood said. “At first I didn’t think I was going to be good (at diving). I did it for fun.”

The health club since has been remodeled and the diving boards have been removed, but Wood never stopped working with Austin.

“He’s been like my dad when I’m away from my dad,” Wood said. “We’ve been close friends for 12 years. Whenever I’ve needed a friend, he’s been there.”

Wood won his first ribbon for a sixth-place finish in an 8-and-under division of a club meet. Then came his string of awards at the Junior Nationals. As a 12-year-old, he became the first diver to sweep titles on all three boards. He repeated the feat the following year in the 13-14 year old division.

In his first international meet, the 1986 Western Hemisphere age-group diving championships, a 12-year-old Wood had two firsts and a fourth.

At Royal High, Wood was academically ineligible his junior year. He redeemed himself this season by winning the boys’ title in the Southern Section 4-A Division diving championships with a section-record number of points.

After the Nationals, Wood will start working toward his long-term goal of qualifying for the Olympic team. He will enroll at Pasadena Community College to be closer to the aquatic center.

Then he will begin a regimen of longer workouts. His task will be to change his dives from a tuck to a pike position and add another twist to dives in which he executes twists.

“That requires an exponential amount of work,” Austin said. “It will require more speed, strength and power in his dives. He can’t do it by just diving. He’ll need to work with weights, do a lot of stretching exercises and work on his tumbling.”

While most young divers consider quitting by their late teens, Wood has been planning his future methodically.

“He has reached his current level of success because of application of 12 years of hard work in the sport, but he really only has scratched the surface of work to reach the next level,” Austin said. “He could reach that level in a year and half to two years.

“He’ll succeed because he knows what he has to do and he’ll do it. That makes a winner and winners are rare.”