BAYLEY FOWLER TAKES SCHOOL RECORD AND TROJANS TEAMMATE BELLA WALTERS TO VALPO DIVING REGIONAL TONIGHT

TOM KEEGAN
onwardtrojans.com

The last ripple from her Chesterton school record diving day had barely settled and already Bayley Fowler was rooting for it to be broken, and she knew just the person to do it: freshman teammate Bella Walters.
“I hope she’s able to because I know she’s capable of it,” Fowler said. “She just has to put her head to it.”
Walters has three-plus years to go for it, but for the moment has another source of pride. She’s competing in Tuesday night’s diving regional at Valparaiso.
“I don’t know the last time Chesterton had two girls get to a regional championship, so it’s going to be really cool,” said Fowler, who set an extremely high bar for Walters to gun for the next three years.
Fowler’s 11-dive score Saturday at the Hobart sectional was 427.15, which gave her the title and the school record. Valpo seniors Alyea Sutherland (422.50) and Reagan Williams (399.20) were second and third. The younger Walters sister scored a 333.15 to edge her sister Breanne (331.75), a senior.
“I knew it was going to be hard, but I thought I could do it,” Bella said.
She and her sister, as well as Fowler, came to the sport from gymnastics. This was the first year diving for the Walters sisters, which makes their scores all the more impressive.
“I got a lot better about halfway through the year,” Bella said.
The key to picking up the art so quickly?
“Listening to my coach,” Bella said, referencing third-year Trojans diving coach Elijah Mercado. “He helped me a lot with form and stuff, which helped. It helped a lot. He’s a good coach. He gives us pep talks before the meet and stuff. If you see us huddled up before the meet, that’s usually why.”
Making the top four to advance to the Valpo regional wasn’t Fowler’s only goal Saturday.
“I wanted to reach it today, so that I wouldn’t have to worry about it anymore,” Fowler said.
She adhered to her basic diving-day routine, replete with one but only one superstition: a Think Pink tea from Nutrition Cove.
“It’s my favorite one. I always remind my mom, but she never forgets anyway,” Fowler said.
Her father cooks breakfast, Saturday it was two pancakes at about 6 a.m.. The team arrived at Hobart at about 7 and the diving competition started at 9. Five dives, a 20-minute break, three dives, break for lunch and back for the final three dives.
Her dive list is set at this point. Same dives in the same order.
“I do two or three of each every day, run through them all, just try to clean them up,” Fowler said.
Her non-diving workouts are heavy on “core stuff because you really need core for this type of sport, and I also do a lot of stretching, so that also helps with my lines and my pikes.”
Beyond benefiting from Mercado’s coaching, Bella Walters has had a front-row seat to how her seriously committed teammate who finished 12th in the state last season goes about staying on a steady improvement curve.
The role model and the coaching help her chances of one day breaking the record Fowler just set. It’s what both divers want down the road. For the moment, they both want to dive well enough to earn a seat on the Thursday bus down to Indianapolis for Friday’s preliminaries and Saturday’s finals at IUPUI.