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03/01/2017 11:00 PMKyle Duby stood tall with his feet firmly planted on the diving board when North Haven hosted Xavier for its Senior Night meet on Feb. 13. Kyle didn’t know it, but he was about to etch his name in the history books by breaking a school record that was set long before he was even born.
Kyle is in the home stretch of his senior season as a captain for the North Haven boys’ swimming and diving team. Indians’ diving coach Bob Lewis told Kyle he had a shot at breaking the record this year, and Kyle put himself in position to post higher scores by increasing the difficulty of his dives. Still, Kyle’s lifetime-best score entering Senior Night was a 234.30, which is well shy of the mark of 256.20 set by Blair Gentry in the early ‘70s.
Kyle went into Senior Night focused on performing a clean set of dives and was earning better scores than he’d been seeing all season. When it came time for his sixth and final attempt, Kyle executed one of the dives he’d implemented this winter—a frontward dive with two-and-a-half flips—and went headfirst into the water. The dive resulted in more top marks from the judges and put his score at 256.85 to break the school record by less than a point.
“I had breaking the school record in mind, but I didn’t think it was possible, so to actually do it was an awesome feeling. It was an awesome atmosphere on Senior Night and just great to break the record,” says Kyle. “I don’t think I’ll truly understand what it means to have broken the record and hold the title for a long time...If anything went different, I would not have broken that record.”
Kyle knew that he had smashed his lifetime-best mark and, based on how loud the crowd was at Gawrych Town Pool, everyone else knew he’d delivered a primetime performance. However, Kyle still wasn’t sure if he’d broken the school record. During the middle of the meet, Kyle’s father and sister drove to the high school to check the score on the leaderboard. Upon returning, they told Kyle that he had in fact eclipsed the record.
The Indians were still competing and so Kyle kept the news under wraps because he didn’t want to distract anyone. Kyle’s accomplishment was announced on the loudspeaker at the high school the next day, and Head Coach Martha Phelan told the team about it at a subsequent practice.
“I was really excited, but I was trying to stay in my shoes. I didn’t want to go brag or anything. But it was really exciting. It was a long-standing record and my chances to break it were so small,” Kyle says. “It was nice when I saw that I scored a 256, which is not a score that you see regularly for diving. So scoring that once in my career is awesome and it was a great feeling when my dad came back and told me I had broken the record. It was a cool moment.”
The dive that put Kyle over the top was the forward two-and-a-half somersault, which carries a degree of difficulty of 2.4. Last year, Kyle was doing a forward one-and-half somersault with a 1.6 degree of difficulty. Coach Lewis says that Kyle came to North Haven as a raw beginner and progressed gradually throughout his tenure, but adds that Kyle saw a spike in his scores during the past two years.
“He’s put a lot of effort into it and his concentration is better. When he’s working on his dives, he’s concentrating more on it, as opposed to just throwing it off the board. He’s working on what he’s doing,” says Lewis, who held the school record prior to Gentry. “He didn’t rush his dives [during the record-setting performance]. He took his time, concentrated on what he had to do, and the judges were with him that day. He dove well that day. At the beginning of the season, he hit a rut, but he stuck with it, and started taking his time and concentrating.”
Kyle typically does between 30 to 35 dives per practice with Lewis while the Indians’ swimmers get in their reps. Kyle says that he “couldn’t ask for a better diving coach” and appreciates how Lewis has pushed him to perform his best, while making sure he focused on the fundamentals first and foremost in his senior season.
“Coach Bob really got me to put my nose to the grindstone,” says Kyle. “He really got me to focus on pointing my toes and straightening my legs [when hitting the water] and the basic techniques that I hadn’t been focused on because I was focusing on acquiring and perfecting harder dives, and it really worked out.”
In addition to Lewis, Kyle thanks Coach Phelan, who says that Kyle has “evolved tremendously,” while “humbly and confidently improving on his diving” throughout the last four years.
Kyle also sends a big shout-out to his teammates on the North Haven boys’ swimming and diving squad. Although the sport is based largely on individual results, Kyle likes how he and his fellow Indians have played a major role in the overall growth of the burgeoning program.
“It’s just such an honor to be competing with these guys and each and every one of them works to their fullest potential,” says Kyle. “I couldn’t be more proud of my teammates. They’ve all been swimming so well and really been going at it by one-upping each other and competing with each other. The team has been getting competitive, which is awesome to see, and I hope the team keeps going like this in the future.”