On Nov. 13 Celia Pinczower won her second straight 3A state diving championship. A senior, Pinczower has been diving competitively for years, finding a thrill in the challenge brought by the sport.

Growing up on the lake, she said was a main catalyst for pursuing the sport, especially after early success as a freshman in high school.

“Every time I’d go to the pool when I was little with all my friends I’d always be doing back flips off the diving board,” she said. Little did she know those first just-for-fun dives would turn into an athletic passion.

After a solid first year diving at the high school, she began to train with the Pacific Northwest Diving club, the only club diving team in the state. For the past three years she’s been training in Federal Way for out of state and national meets, driving to the King County Aquatic Center four days a week for practice, typically leaving at 5 a.m.

“It’s definitely been difficult with all the homework, but I use my time wisely at school,” she said. The difficulty of that schedule paid off last year when colleges across the country began to notice. Of the six schools that showed interest, she narrowed it down to the University of Southern California.

“I always knew I kind of wanted to go to California, because both my parents are from there and just the idea of being able to dive in the sun everyday is going to be awesome,” she said. “Also, USC’s coach is Hongping Li one of the best coaches in the entire country and maybe even the world, he’s very well known in China too. He has an Olympian on the team (Ariel Rittenhouse) and Pac10 champion and it’s a really good team. I’m very excited.”

As she has progressed Pinczower has mastered dives on the 1-meter spring board and worked her way up to a list of dives at the 3-meter spring board level, and just recently began focusing on 10-meter platform dives.

“In the past few months and the next few months I’m really going to try and work to build a full 10-meter list, something I’ll hopefully be able to have for college,” she said. While Pinczower said she’d done 10-meter dives before, adding the optionals, like the divers who compete at the Olympics do, was stressful at first.

“Just about a month ago I was doing my first optional up there, one of the handstand dives and I was kicking up and the only thing going through my mind was ‘Oh my gosh, Celia, why are you doing this right now? Look how high up you are’. I had a mini-heart attack, I can’t believe I got myself to do it. The second time I was like I already did it once, I’m ok,” she said. Like many other sports, it can be dangerous, which is why Pinczower said divers must always be focused.

“You always have to know what you’re doing and fully concentrate and put 100 precent of your effort into it every time otherwise you can get seriously injured,” she said.

As a member of the Juanita Rebels swim team at the high school Pinczower dove at school meets and at the state competition, while also staying up to date on the club side of things. But she said, despite competing at a different level on the club side of things, high school diving competitions and practice helped her become more confident. She also said it’s helped her learn to coach her self in some ways, seeing what she’s done wrong or right on video recordings of her dives and making corrections.

One of the reasons Piczower eventually said yes to USC and no to other schools like Columbia and the University of North Carolina where the training facilities. She said the school, while not only have top coaches and being a great academic school, also had a full diving tower, something which only a handful of place have.

“Most Division I schools have both a springboard and platform tower, but a lot of schools only have springboard because even though diving is more popular in other states there really aren’t that many towers out there,” she said. “I’m lucky because USC has a tower. I was definitely looking for a school that had a full tower.”

While she continues to practice and compete through the rest of her senior year, Pinczower said she’s looking forward to spending time with friends before she goes off to college. Of course a favorite memory will be her high school coach Dawn Maurer handed her the state title medal on the podium last month.

“It was a amazing,” she said of that moment.