Two months ago, it wasn’t entirely clear that Ella Taylor was even the best diver on her team. This weekend, she’s looking to prove she’s one of the best in the state.
The Indian Creek freshman has enjoyed a meteoric rise in recent weeks, going from relative afterthought — she finished fifth in an early December tri-meet against Greenwood and Whiteland — to a regional runner-up who heads into Saturday’s state meet as one of the top seeds.
Taylor is the first girl from Indian Creek to qualify for the state diving finals since her mother Kate, now the Braves’ coach, did so in 1993.
"Things have changed so much with diving, and I’m learning along with her," Kate Taylor said. "She is a much more talented diver than I ever was, so as a mom/coach, it’s just been really fun to watch her decide she was going to reach hard for these goals and achieve them."
And, by any means necessary, that’s exactly what Ella Taylor has done. Since the start of the season, when she struggled mightily in a November meet at Mooresville — "I didn’t even have a back 1 1/2," she said — the ninth-grader has added six new dives to her repertoire, giving her the ability to compete with the top divers in the state.
Ella’s score of 434.05 at Tuesday’s Jasper Regional was the eighth-highest mark posted at any of the four regional sites, meaning that the rookie has a good shot to make it onto the awards podium at the IU Natatorium.
Not bad for someone so relatively new to the sport that she wasn’t even familiar with the venue until recently.
"I didn’t even know what the Nat was until a couple of days ago," Ella Taylor said. "Everybody was like, ‘You know, the Nat,’ and I was like, ‘I don’t.’"
Once she pieced it together and realized that the pool has played host to several Olympic trials and other major championship meets, the nerves started to kick in a little bit. Fortunately, her mother has been on that stage before and has been able to provide some guidance.
"She’s like, ‘What are the boards like, Mom?’" Kate Taylor shared. "And I said, ‘They’re like butter, and the water is 95 degrees, and it’s just so fun to be there and experience it."
Getting to this point didn’t seem all that likely for Ella even just a few short weeks ago. She made her first foray onto the board as a sixth-grader and says she didn’t even like it that much at first — but friend and current teammate Mia Greene convinced her to stick it out for another year, and at that point, Taylor says, "it just kind of picked up for me and I’ve loved it ever since."
The struggles she went through earlier this season only strengthened her resolve to improve. When Ella would bomb a dive, she didn’t try to forget it and move on; she used it as motivation to master that dive and the next one as well.
"Her mental toughness is one of the things I’m most proud of," Kate Taylor said. "She had one dive (at the regional), her fourth-round dive, that she’d really like back, and she came back her fifth round and did the best inward 1 1/2 of her life — and that is the kind of mental toughness that you need to be successful at the top level."
That toughness should serve Ella well this weekend, when the pressure will be the most intense she’s faced in her young diving career. Even without any fans in attendance, the Nat can be intimidating, but Taylor has reached every other seemingly unreachable goal she’s set for herself this season.
She’s got one more in mind.
"I can’t let down my guard just because I made it to state," she said. "My goal is to make it to the last round so I’m a state finalist."
That would be a pretty good way to end a season that feels like it’s just the start of something bigger.
