Junior Becca Gregory stands firmly perched at the edge of the diving board with her back to the looming water below. She spreads her arms out to her sides in a perfectly straight line, as she balances her weight on the tip of her toes. Becca deviates her mind elsewhere, blocking out the thought of the water fifteen feet beneath her. She lightly bounces up and down, preparing for her dive and slowly raises her arms above her head, her fingertips directly parallel with her vertical form. A rush of adrenaline overcomes her, and she springs off the board. Her body rapidly spins in a 360 motion, and the water surrounding her splashes into the air as she glides into the pool.

Becca’s seemingly effortless landing is attributed not only to months of practice and dedication, but also to her experience in a technically similar sport, gymnastics. Prior to diving, Becca had been a competitive gymnast for six years, as well as a competitive cheerleader and dancer for seven years before that. By earning high enough scores at regional and state competitions, including a state championship, Becca made two appearances representing Missouri at the Junior Olympics.

“Becca has always been a very driven person,” Becca’s father Brian Gregory said. “When there’s a skill that she wants, she will work on it nonstop, night and day, until she gets it. Even when she was little in dance she would just practice in the house for hours and hours.”

At her second and final Junior Olympics, Becca competed in three events — mini-trampoline, trampoline and tumbling. Her intense training for months prior to the competition paid off, as she finished in the top ten in her division and the top 25 in the nation for each event. After the competition, conflicts with the coaches influenced Becca to compete for another gymnastics team. However, she only stayed with the new team for two seasons before making the decision to quit the sport.

“At that point, [after the Junior Olympics], I knew I wasn’t going to go anywhere with gymnastics,” Becca said. “I tried another team, but it just wasn’t the same. I hit my prime and I was done.”

A factor that played into Becca’s decision to quit gymnastics was her newfound interest in diving. She was introduced to the sport by a former gymnastics coach who recognized that Becca had reached the point in gymnastics where she had accomplished what she was capable of, and that it was time for her to challenge herself with a new sport. Diving was appealing to Becca because the flips she had mastered in tumbling would be beneficial when doing flips off a diving board.

After she spent a year and half participating in both gymnastics and diving, alternating which days she attended practice for each sport and simultaneously balancing schoolwork and a social life, Becca made the difficult decision to quit gymnastics.

“It was so hard to quit because I’d spent so much of my time and so much of my life dedicated to [gymnastics],” Becca said. “It was really hard walking away from that knowing that I was done.”

Balancing both gymnastics and diving created a hectic schedule for Becca, but she was still able to find success in her new sport, as she won 5A Girls State Dive Championships in her first full season of competition her sophomore year. However, Becca’s diving career began with a rough start. She decided to quit halfway through the season freshman year, only after competing at two meets, in which she placed third and first, respectively.

“The coach issue I had with the gymnastics coach led me to have trust issues with coaches in general, and I just freaked out, and there were flashbacks of it,” Becca said. “I just needed to get away from sports and take a break from it for a minute.”

As dive season approached sophomore year, Becca was encouraged by her parents to rejoin the sport, as they saw the potential she had in diving and recognized that she thrived in a competitive atmosphere. While Becca was initially hostile toward beginning diving again, she came back to the team with a new outlook.

“[When she rejoined], there was a little bit of a different attitude,” Girls’ Diving coach Russ Ingold said. “Not that the attitude was bad before, but it seemed like she was more driven, and she had some more goals. She was willing to do things she’d never done before.”

Even though Becca hadn’t dived in over a year, she hadn’t lost any of her skill. While state qualifiers must receive cumulatively a high enough score out of a possible eleven dives, Becca reached the qualifying mark by receiving high scores on only six dives at just her second meet of the season. At her qualifying meet, Becca surpassed the diver in second place by 83 points and was the second Southwest diver ever to qualify for State.

“The goal is always to qualify for State,” Ingold said. “After a while, she saw she had that possibility. It was more of a mental thing than a physical thing, and once she finally got that in her head that she had that possibility, she just skyrocketed.”

Being the only Southwest diver to qualify for State presented Becca the one-on-one opportunity to train with Ingold. She practiced for two months before the competition, perfecting the 11 dives that she would be performing at State, all of differing degrees of difficulty. However, even though she had mastered the majority of her dives, she was discouraged by her inability to execute one in particular, the reverse dive, in which the diver stands at the edge of the diving board to seemingly do a frontflip, but instead does a backflip.

“There was this one practice before State where I just broke down,” Becca said. “I was like, ‘There’s no way I can get this dive.’ I needed that dive to win State, and I was like, ‘It’s not going to happen.’ But I was so motivated. I really wanted to do well at State, and I didn’t want to embarrass myself there, so I just had to do it.”

At the 2014 State meet in Topeka, Becca competed against 5A divers from around Kansas, many who had multiple years of experience, as well as some who already had diving scholarships for college. While the competition initially intimidated Becca, her high scores solidly kept her second place at the end of the first day of the meet. Becca said that she would’ve been pleased with a second place finish; however, Ingold strategically planned the order of Becca’s 11 dives so that she’d perform her best dives and those of the highest degree of difficulty on the second and final day of the competition. For her final three dives, Becca scored her personal best on each dive and ended up winning the competition by 20 points, making her the first Southwest Girls’ Diving State Champion.

“[Becca] has always been at the top of all the sports that she’s done, so it’s not like we expect her [to win], but that’s just her — she wants to win,” Becca’s mother, Amy Gregory said.

Since quitting gymnastics, Becca has dedicated the time she once spent attending gymnastics practices toward diving. In June, she joined the Kansas City Diving Club, where she’s the youngest diver on a team of college divers who dive for Division I and Division II schools across the country. Becca said that training alongside college divers has allowed her to think more seriously about scholarships for diving and her future in the sport.

“I would love to see her dive through college because I know she could do it,” Amy said. “But at the same time, for her she has to be happy, or she isn’t going to want to do it and she isn’t going to do it well.”

As of now, Becca has aspirations to dive for the University of Arkansas or the University of Kentucky. She and her club diving coach plan on touring universities that could possibly award her diving scholarships starting at the beginning of senior year. Becca said that the fellow divers on her team have given her an inside look into college diving, as well as giving her invaluable advice to heighten her success in high school.

“The best advice one of my club teammates gave me was to be stupid when you’re diving, because you can’t think about your diving, or you’ll get in your head and scare yourself and mess yourself up,” Becca said. “I just think about random things [when I’m diving]. I sing in my head, or I just try to distract myself.”

Before her high school diving career is over, Becca hopes to win State at least once more, as well as possibly break a state record. She’s also currently close to qualifying for All-American consideration.

“State is one of those things where you can look back on it and be like, ‘This is why I’m doing [diving],’” Becca said. “I want to have more moments like that.”