By Michael Wojtychiw

In the scope of Chicago Public League swimming and diving, the art of diving is one of the more overlooked parts of the sport. Not many schools have diving programs, so opportunities for many CPL divers are few and far between.

For some who are interested in diving, that means having to go outside of school to perfect their craft, helping them get better and maybe even earn an opportunity to dive at the collegiate level.

Amundsen’s Vivianne Affatato is one of those students who had to follow that very path this season.

After being a member of the swimming team for her first three years of her high school career, Affatato decided she wanted to try diving her senior season.

The only problem was that Amundsen didn’t have a diving team. So Affatato had to take her talents to a club program, the Evanston Diving Club, which practices out of Northwestern University.

But why diving? Why switch in her senior season?

“I started doing gymnastics when I was around five years old, but it just wasn’t for me, so I moved over to the arts and did circus arts for a really long time” she said. “When I started high school, I joined the swim team, did that for three years, joined a club team.

“I was interested in combining the skills of tumbling and swimming, so I tried diving and loved it. I’ve been doing it for eight months now.”

The switch paid off as Affatato would end up earning an opportunity to dive in college, committing to Lawrence University, a school three-and-a-half hours north of Chicago in Appleton, Wisconsin.

The opportunity to dive in college, or participate in the sport in general at the next level, wasn’t something that she always felt was an option as she navigated her high school career at the North Side school.

“Diving recruiting was definitely different than swimming recruiting, because for swim, it’s a lot of just sending in your race times,” she said. “I had actually started the process with swimming recruiting, so had been contacting schools already. I talked to some of those schools and told them I was planning on switching to diving, so they asked for some videos. I sent them footage, kept sending it through the season and they told me I’d be able to be molded into a diver.

“The community at Lawrence is amazing. I met members of the swim and dive team and they’re probably the coolest people I’ve ever met. The campus is beautiful. I really wanted the small-college experience and there’s just so much beauty all over, it’s amazing.

“I never had the thought of being a college athlete. I probably started realizing it would be a possibility to swim in college during my sophomore year, when I was starting to get pretty good at swim. Because swim and dive are so intertwined together into teams, I got really lucky that the switch going from one to another was relatively easy.”

Working out with the Evanston Diving Club, one coached by diving coaches who had sent many divers to the collegiate level, coached Olympians and won numerous diving awards throughout their diving careers, really helped Affatato as she started with what was a relatively new sport to her.

“I remember when I went to club swim and they were using a completely different language than I was used to,” she said. “When I decided to do diving, I knew nobody, had never done the sport before, but they said I could learn really quickly just off of my prior sports.

“Now that I’m doing club, it’s a minimum of three times a week for two-hour practices,” Affatato said. “It encompasses an hour of dryland, so lifting weights, mimicking dives before we actually try them in the water.”

Lawrence University starts its competitive season in October.

The team brings back the conference’s three-time conference diver of the year, but Affatato knows she’ll be able to still make an impact.

“There are only four divers, so I’ll actually be able to get involved right away,” she said. “We start training the week school starts and then about a month into the school year, we start competing. There’s no JV or Varsity, so I’ll be a key member of the team, participating with all the others right away.”