“I just love the feeling of almost being able to fly.”
Krista Shimizu can fly, all right. Despite not taking up the sport until her freshman year, the Summit Prep senior has made herself one of the top divers in the state.
“I was a gymnast for almost ten years,” Shimizu said. “I grew up flipping and jumping on the trampoline and everything like that.”
An injury ended her gymnastics career, and her mom suggested diving, but Krista wasn’t so sure at first.
“At first I was like, eh, I don’t think I’m going to be able to do that,” she said. “We have a pool at my house, and we have this small diving board. I would do flips and stuff but would never go in on my hands, because that was too weird.”
It wasn’t weird for long, though. She decided to give it a try, and when area diving coach Richard Hackett got a look at her, he knew she had talent.
“She did have a lot of raw talent to start with,” he said. “We just kind of refined her and got her going.”
As a former gymnast, Shimizu displayed the “athletic ability” and “spatial awareness” Hackett looked for in potential divers.
“She had had some gymnastics background, so she had a little bit of an idea,” he said. “She just caught on really fast.”
Despite the natural talent, Krista always approached diving as something like a hobby.
“Diving was just kind of that thing to transition out of gymnastics,” she said. “I never really thought of it as too competitive.”
As such, she never gave diving collegiately much thought, even though her coach thinks she could.
“She’s good enough to dive at the next level,” Hackett said. “She could go to college and dive for a lot of schools in this country.”
Not that she’s closed the door completely.
“I’m not planning on it right now,” she said. “I might be able to walk on or something.”
If she does, she’ll be walking on at BYU, where she plans to attend in the fall and major in athletic training. She wants to be able to help athletes dealing with injuries just like she had to.
“I specifically wanted to do athletic training to work with athletes because I know they want to work hard and to be able to be well and be competitive,” she said.
All that makes Summit Prep’s Krista Shimizu our Arby’s Athlete of the Week.
