Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/114977
ND Sports of earning All-America honors at the NCAA Championships. Finally, on the last day of February, the senior made history, becoming the first Big East diver ever to complete a clean sweep of four championships in a row in an event. ���She���s head and shoulders above the other divers most of the time,��� Irish diving coach Caiming Xie said. ���She���s very powerful. She has the power you need to make the hard dive. Some people have good technique, but they don���t have the ability to make it around, necessarily.��� Chiang���s performance this year led Notre Dame to another kind of sweep at the conference meet in Indianapolis. She and Xie won the Big East Diver of the Year and Diving Coach of the Year awards. In addition, Irish sophomore Emma Reaney won the Swimmer of the Year award while Barnes took home Coach of the Year honors. Notre Dame, however, came up a few races short and finished the meet in second place behind Louisville. The Irish men���s team did a little record breaking of its own. They scored the most points ever in a Big East Championships meet on their way to a second consecutive conference crown. An impressive weekend for both teams left the winner���s podium sufficiently shrouded in blue and gold, and Chiang stood at its peak. The upstate New York native first started diving when she was 7 years old. She wanted to be a gymnast, but the nearest gym was a 30-minute drive from home. The pool was much closer, so she started landing her somersaults in water instead of a foam pit. Chiang practiced with mostly older divers while she was growing up, and she struggled to keep pace. When she stopped growing, and settled into the 5-8 frame that Xie said is well constructed and aligned to help her explode off the board, she started finding success. Chiang won all four of her conference championships at Fairport High School and earned All-America honors all four seasons. When she arrived at Notre Dame, Chiang clashed with Xie, who spent 13 years coaching China���s national and Olympic teams before coming to the U.S. His style was a world away from that of the American coaches Chiang knew. Technically, Chinese divers are taught to start flipping before they approach the apex of their jump. Most Americans learn to stretch to leap as high as they can before starting their routine on their way toward the water. Learning to work with her new coach, though, was a much bigger adjustment for the young diver. ���We definitely butted heads,��� she said. ���In China, the coach says this and you do exactly what your coach says. I���ve always been used to having this open line of communication and asking why I���m doing certain things. I think we���ve both kind of meshed to each other���s comfort.��� Whatever compromise they reached, it worked. Xie has helped Chiang harness her power with precision technique, and she���s improved steadily during a dominant four years at Notre Dame. One more goal remains for Chiang