Zone all his own
| Thursday, Apr 09 2009 10:45 AM
Last Updated Thursday, Apr 09 2009 11:06 AM
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Henry A. Barrios / The Californian Bryce Ogden practices a front 1 1/2 with 1 twist at the C.S.U.B. pool.
Bryce Ogden gets on the diving board, and he shuts it all out.
The crowd. The breeze. The pressure.
All of it.
The classes. The tests. The girls.
All of it.
The stuttering -- and the teasing -- in his past. The promise in his future.
All of it.
On that board, Ogden has one thing on his mind.
"I've told a lot of divers who have just started: 'Once you're on the board, you don't think about anything else,'" Ogden said. "Think about what you have to do and stop everything else. Some of them can't do it. But if you can, it helps you that much more."
Then Ogden tells the story of Chris Colwill, a U.S. Olympian diver from the Beijing Games who has 60 percent hearing loss.
"I would love to have that," Ogden said. "If you're on the board and someone makes a coughing sound or something, that'll throw you off. You really have to zone out. Some people can do it, some don't know how."
Ogden does. He is a Centennial senior who easily is the best boys diver in town, and it's not a stretch to say that's true for the Central Section as a whole. He finished second in the 1-meter event last year, but he was the only underclassman within 100 points of the lead. This year, he's undefeated.
"He's matured physically over the last year quite a bit," said Cliff Johansen, the CSUB diving coach and also Ogden's club coach. "His physical strength is above the other kids he was diving with. Now he's able to do dives he couldn't before."
The real kicker is that Ogden didn't even start diving until he was a freshman, though he did have the distinct advantage of being a gymnast for four years before that.
"It's such an easy transition, with the air-awareness part of it -- gymnasts are used to flying around," Johansen said. "And then the boardwork, he has learned so quickly that once all this sets in, he's really going to take off. He has the ability to go as far as he wants to with diving."
Ogden doesn't hide from that fact.
"My goal is to win nationals," Ogden said. "I don't really care about (section or) state, either. I figure, why shoot for something smaller when you can get something bigger at the same time?"
But not everything has always been so easy for Ogden.
He grew up with a moderate stutter, an impediment he said caused him plenty of grief.
"I got teased a lot about it," Ogden said. "A bunch of people would just make fun of me. They'd mimic me. It just kind of made me not want to say much.
"It made me want to try harder to stop. It's something really hard I've had to overcome."
He had the stutter under control by the time he got to Centennial, though he still met with Pucci Honeyman, the school's speech pathologist each week.
"He's really a remarkable kid," Honeyman said. "He's very determined to correct his speech and very goal-oriented. He has a very positive outlook on life. You tell yourself that you are going to succeed and you are going to kick this stuttering. And now, when you speak to him, you probably don't notice anything."
It's no surprise, then, that Ogden has become a proficient diver, too.
"In diving, you have to have a lot of patience on the board. You can't rush things," Ogden said. "Maybe diving helped me overcome (speech problems). You have to visualize it, then you have to do it."
Up until the moment he has to climb the diving board, Ogden listens to music -- usually techno, he said, because the beat helps him focus. Than it's showtime.
"The music helps me relax, and then I just tone everything else out," he said. "It's almost like I'm brain-dead to everything else."
