FROM THE NEST | FALL 2023 | 31 so getting yourself to go off into water where you know that you have only a certain amount of control [is tough]. If something goes wrong, you could smack your front, smack your back and get a little sunburn kind of thing. What helps me is just telling myself that I’ve done this for a few years. It’s not a new dive most of the time that I’m worried about. Just every day in practice, thinking you’ve done this before, you’re going to be fine. What’s your mindset? With other sports, a lot of your preparation is for the opponent but with diving, you get scored on your performance. I was talking about this with one of my roommates the other day because she’s on Lehigh’s basketball team. We were talking about how different it is in an individual sport or a team sport. Diving, you don't have to think about defense at all, which is a huge part of a lot of other sports. During the meets, I just focus on myself. I just tell myself what I have to do for every dive, not, “I have to get this many points.” I know that works for some people, knowing where they are at each stage, every dive. I don’t think about it. I try to put the least amount of pressure on myself that I can because, with school and everything, there’s already so much pressure, so I want diving to still be fun and not as much pressure as school. I just focus on my dive, focus on getting through it safely, not getting injured and then whatever happens, happens. You finished third in the state diving championships your senior year of high school. Is that your proudest athletic achievement so far? My proudest achievement is when I broke Lehigh’s record on 1-meter this past year because, in high school, that was always my goal and I didn't get to do it. … I’m glad that I broke it. It was really exciting. You also got to compete at the NCAA diving championships and were the first Lehigh diver since 2018 to do so. Yeah, it was really cool. And I never had that experience of a big meet because COVID kind of disrupted everything in high school and I never competed for a club at a bigger meet like that. I’ve also never competed with [that many divers]—I think it was around 80. That experience, waiting so long in between your turns, we probably waited 45 minutes, which is a while to cool down and then have to get ready again before your next time. But I’m really glad I got to experience that. Now I can appreciate at [the Patriot League Championships] when it’s only 30 people and it’s a way shorter time. The last few years I was like, “Ugh, this is taking so long.” But now, compared to that, it’ll be fast. What’s one fun fact that people may not know about you? I really love traveling. I’ve been to about 30 states and 15 countries. My first trip on an airplane was when I was 4 months old. I went to a family wedding in Nebraska. My most recent trip—I studied abroad in Spain this past summer. Where did you study in Spain? In Grenada, a little town in the southern part of the country What was the best thing about that experience? I made a lot of friends, and the culture there is very different, especially around eating and eating times. It’s a lot more of a family [focus], long and drawn out, very talkative time, whereas here, we kind of rush through, especially lunch. We rush through it, go on to our next thing. If you have class or practice, you just go, go, go. Their lunch started at 2 every day. It was one to two hours long, drawn out. You talk with your friends, you talk with your family, you talk with anyone. Same with dinner. —Stephen Gross
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