The reader should know that I am a diving coach and a former diver. This has been for a total of almost 43 years now. I by no means claim to be an expert in diving just as I have no claims to being a PHD, an engineer with a specialty in fluid dynamics nor do I have a background in Biomechanics. I am just an average individual who is concerned that the courts/lawyers, swimming pool industry and maybe even the Diving National Governing Body are recommending pools that may be deeper than is necessary for diving. We must begin an investigation into the depth issue. How deep is deep enough? Am I going to give definitive answers here? The answer is no. You will have to draw your own conclusions and hopefully some of the following information may help you do that.

This will not be a discussion of the Safety of the activity. I believe that the safety of the activity is a well-documented one now. This is a discussion that proposes a reasonable depth be established so that more pools will be built or renovated in the future that will provide a place to dive and will be safe for both the general public and competitive divers.

Since there is and never has been any consensus on how deep is deep enough, I would like to start by suggesting that a reasonable depth be determined. To blindly follow what any National or International Governing Bodies recommend is a recipe for the disappearance of diving boards at local swimming pools. This would occur for reasons of expense and not safety. If this trend continues, all pools will follow NCAA or US Diving specifications. The dilemma is that small communities and high schools can not afford to build facilities that follow those guidelines. That would mean that these deep pools would be unavailable to the individual who may be interested in diving unless he/she is willing to travel great distances to get to these facilities. If they do become the only facilities where diving may take place, it would seem that the number of divers for these institutions will decrease exponentially.

What is known at this time is that none of the National Governing Bodies will guarantee the safety of the depths they recommend and not all of these recommended depths are the same either. That should demonstrate that they don't even agree on the depth issue. Architects are the individuals who recommend depths by designing pools deeper and the deeper they go the more money they make. A couple of the NGB's only confirm that there has never been a catastrophic injury in the pools they sanction for contests. Is this the only criteria that confirms what a safe depth is? How many other pools across the country can make that same claim? The answer is … a lot and many are not as deep either. The problem that faces Diving is that courts/lawyers follow these guidelines when any litigation occurs. I don't believe that diving depths should be dictated by the courts/lawyers or the architects. We are the supposed experts in this field and as coaches we have done little in determining what is safe and what is not.

I would like to start with a hypothetical situation I came across when researching the diving safety question in the late 1970's and early 1980's. I will not bore the reader with the statistical information, formulas and other scientific explanations used in these studies. Someone figured out exactly how much force had to be exerted (psi) to fracture a cervical vertebra. That fracture was also assumed to cause paralysis. With this in mind, the following hypothetical question arose. If a diver dives from the side of the pool with the hands at the sides (a sailor dive) and goes straight down, how deep does the pool have to be for him/her to intentionally hit the bottom with the head and not sustain a catastrophic cervical injury? The answer to this was in excess of 24 feet. That is mind boggling. Water resistance was the only force relied upon to slow the diver's speed enough to keep him/her from injury. Remember that this was a dive from the side of the pool and not from a diving board. In the above situation our diver may not fracture a cervical vertebra but he/she will still have a bump on the head and may even be rendered unconscious. Under this same scenario if the diver were making this attempt from a 1-meter diving board, it would have to be deeper than the dive from the deck. If it were from the 3 meter, it would have to be even deeper yet (30 1/2 feet).

A couple of the NGB's recommend that pools be 12 ft deep for a 1-meter board. If we look back at the above situation, that is only half as deep as the sailor dive from the side of the pool. A statement appeared with this scenario that might make my argument a little clearer. It would be difficult to conclude that by adding a foot or two of depth provides greater safety under the condition of no steering posed in this situation, if the contact forces are in excess of those that a diver can manage. It would also be an engineering feat to build something that deep that would still hold water.

To an uninformed individual, it would appear that diving is "potentially" unsafe unless you have a really deep pool in which to dive. That idea is not supported by any statistical evidence. The sport became a focus of attention when shallow water dives in the late 1970's were found to be the cause of serious diving related injuries. Then again in the 1990's residential and apartment complex pools with diving boards re-created this unwarranted attention to the activity.

As a coach, I know that whatever depth a pool is, eventually a diver will make it to the pool bottom. Making assumptions based on the potential for injury is not a good practice in determining a safe depth. Divers do not go straight to the bottom of the pool unless they are trained to do so. Diving is a learned experience. Ask a small child to go into the deep water and you will notice that they always jump in feet first. They must be taught to dive. When they are, it can be observed that they use a steering maneuver that is very shallow. Beginning divers usually hurt themselves as they enter the water by either landing as a belly flop or arching their back as they enter the water. Both of these scenarios occur because they try to steer back up to the surface too early. They must be taught to go deeper and allow the water to slow them down enough not to get hurt and then come up to the surface.

I believe the answer to how deep is deep enough lies in what the diver does once he/she has entered the water. An engineer and a PHD came up with the idea of an underwater steering radius after observing people dive. How much of a circular path would be needed for the diver to change direction underwater and still be able to withstand the forces that come into play? According to these guys, it is possible to have a circular path of 4 feet or less from a 3-meter diving board. A radius of 5 to 6 feet appeared to be within the capabilities of the experimental divers observed. All of this was calculated for the worst case diver and a depth was assigned. I believe that they were on the right track with their assumptions and feel that this research justifies the standard that the National Federation of High Schools, the Illinois High School Association and the State of Illinois Swimming Pool Code have set for the 1-meter board (10 ft.). Those researchers justified this information to a pool with a shallower depth.

Competitive divers do all sorts of things under water to steer away from the bottom. They use a steering radius similar to the above but add a little extra something that causes the body to decelerate more rapidly and/or stop and rotate underwater. Most times their steering radius is smaller than that of the experimental divers mentioned earlier. Competitive divers also employ a somersault underwater. These are called saves. Saves are a part of most dives but the by-product of these saves causes the diver to rotate away from the bottom, stop rapidly or both of these simultaneously. The arch and/or bending at the waist and/or knees cause this rapid deceleration and /or rotation. An underwater observation of two world class divers during one Olympic Trial year was that both were traveling parallel to the bottom as their feet disappeared underwater. Neither diver is over six feet tall. One dive was performed from the 3-meter board and the other from the 10-meter platform. The change in underwater direction seemed to correspond to the forces and speed involved when the initial underwater steering move was made. This demonstrates that there was almost 10 feet of unused water between these two divers and the bottom of the pool. In the earlier statement that divers will eventually get to the bottom of a deep pool, one must be aware that the reverse is also true. Divers can make the necessary adjustments to shallower pools and many have been doing so for a number of years by relying on the underwater saves.

Rapid deceleration has been demonstrated in some water shows where an individual jumps from a high place into a couple of feet of water. The individual walks away from the tub uninjured. A belly flop is the reason for that rapid deceleration and allows him to come away unharmed. This deceleration is caused by the entire surface of the body absorbing the force of impact. The body position creates the most amount of surface resistance, which keeps this diver from penetrating very deep beneath the surface. This extreme example was used to demonstrate that water resistance is the key force that when used properly keeps divers away from the pool bottom. The saves that divers use creates this water resistance to keep them far from the bottom.

Somewhere between this belly flop and the condition of no steering mentioned earlier lies the answer to how deep is deep enough. It is up to those of us involved with diving to determine where that point is. We must come up with this answer to keep the diving areas we now have and make them more affordable so that a variety of organizations will not only build them but keep them in operation. We must avoid building facilities that will be closed like the one in Spain that was built for the Olympic Games. All pools with diving areas do not have to match the depths of Olympic venues simply because all divers are not World Class Olympic Divers.

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