San Benito’s Andrade ranked No. 1 in TCAL
San Benito High School’s Jason Andrade is the No. 1 diver in the
Tri County Athletic League this season and one of the favorites to
make a huge splash in next month’s Central Coast Section Diving
Championships.
San Benito’s Andrade ranked No. 1 in TCAL
San Benito High School’s Jason Andrade is the No. 1 diver in the Tri County Athletic League this season and one of the favorites to make a huge splash in next month’s Central Coast Section Diving Championships.
Andrade’s motto for success is simple: “Either go big or go home.”
In other words, Andrade would much rather attempt a difficult dive that requires a huge degree of skill and technical moves than pull off a simple, safe one.
“I really like the amount of difficulty involved in diving and the preciseness of it,” said the 17-year-old senior. “I like how extreme and over-the-top it is compared to swimming.”
Andrade also competes in the 50-meter freestyle and 100-meter backstroke events on the Balers swim team, but he enjoys diving much more.
“In swimming, you just go back and forth, but diving puts life into the sport,” Andrade said. “It’s more exciting, like water polo.”
Andrade’s love of water polo is what actually got him into diving, in a roundabout way.
“I took up swimming because I wanted to get faster for water polo,” said Andrade, who played the driver position during his four-years in the Baler water polo program. “Then when I started swimming I noticed that the team kept losing points in the diving competition because we had no divers. I was always able to jump high and I could do back flips just standing on the ground, so I thought I’d give it a try.”
Almost as quickly as he picked the sport up, it soon became clear that Andrade possessed all the skills to excel on the one-meter spring board. And had it not been for Salinas High diver Sam Figueroa – the winner of the last three TCAL Diving Championships – Andrade would have had three titles of his own. But this season Andrade has taken it to a new level, and he’s already beaten Figueroa in a head-to-head dual meet, making him the clear favorite to win the title before he graduates.
“Beating him was a pretty big accomplishment,” Andrade said.
This season Andrade believes he was able to overtake his archrival thanks to better focus and visualization techniques.
“In the past, I have been my own worst enemy,” said Andrade, who went into the CCS championship last year ranked fifth, and wound up finishing 11th. “I’ve messed up because of nerves or butterflies in the stomach. Now I try to picture myself doing the dive well before I do the dive. And I guess it doesn’t hurt to sing a little song in my head to take away the pressure.”
During a typical meet Andrade performs six dives. His gamut of dives includes front and back dives; reverse and inward dives; and one twisting dive and an optional dive that the divers can chose at their own discretion.
Andrade’s specialty is his 2.5 somersault forward dive and his two somersault backward dive.
“The harder the dive, the more I like it,” Andrade said.
Harder dives also rack up points quicker than conservative ones, which is part of the reason Andrade was able to qualify for CCS after competing in the first two meets this season. Divers need to score 280 points in two separate meets to qualify. Andrade scored more than 320 points in his first two meets to breeze through the qualifying process.
In order to perfect his skills, Andrade practices three times a week for 1.5 hours each time. So far, he has only competed on the one-meter board but that will change in college where spring boards can be as high as seven meters from the water’s surface.
“I plan on diving at the college level so higher dives are something that I’ll need to look into,” said Andrade, who has a lot of schools interested in him based on his diving skills and scholarly 4.3 GPA. “I’ll most likely dive off of three- or five-meter spring boards in college. Any higher and you go off of platforms. I don’t want to do that. I like the spring board because I use it to do tricks. I like the experience of going up before I go down.”
Next year he plans on doing his dives for either U.C. Davis, which has an NCAA Division I diving program, or Division II California Polytechnic Institute at San Luis Obispo.
“I talked with both coaches, and they’re both good schools,” Andrade said. “The Davis program is more advanced, but I’ll be happy wherever I go. I just hope I’m able to experience diving at the college level and see where it takes me.”
