Junior Spencer Cune admits she has a competitive nature and it sometimes gets her in trouble.
Cune liked gymnastics but admitted she wasn’t very good at it; and she did swimming as a freshman, but wasn’t having that much success either.
So Cune decided to get into one-meter diving for the El Dorado High girls swimming team — where two of her previous sports she competed in combined — and found her niche.
“This is actually the next best thing,” Cune said about the combination of gymnastics and water sports. “I was able to bring in some gymnastics and I’m always in the pool.”
Cune was one of the favorites to win the event in the Ark Valley-Chisholm Trail League Division II meet at the EHS Natatorium, and she didn’t disappoint, winning the event with a league record 310.50 points after 11 dives.
“It felt really good,” Cune said. “It was between me and this other girl; and when they called my name, my mom was crying. It felt good to win at home and to break the record felt even better.”
Now the junior has her sights set on the KSHSAA meet that takes place Friday afternoon at Topeka’s Hummer Sports Complex Natatorium; but there was a few times during the spring her chances of making it to the state meet were getting slimmer and slimmer.
Cune went through a lull during the middle of the season because she was the only diver on the Lady Wildcats, and she had to work on harder dives to get her degree of difficulty up. Not only does the KSHSAA meet have a qualifying score, but also a qualifying degree of difficulty for the state meet (10.2 degree of difficulty in a six-dive meet; 12.2 in an 11-dive event).
“It took me a while to get the routine,” Cune said.
Diving coach David Powell said there are a number of factors that make Cune a competitive diver.
“She’s got a lot of desire, probably too much desire sometimes and she gets herself worked up to the point that she almost hyperventilates because she wants to do things so perfectly and so badly,” Powell said. “That’s a good trait and being daring and not afraid is also good because there will be times when you ‘crash and burn’ and you will land wrong and things that will hurt, but you get back on the board and grit your teeth. She’s interested in going up there and putting her all into her dives.”
Cune and Powell said the big change came when Kelsey LaForge came out to dive with her. LaForge finished third in the league meet.
“I had someone to dive with my freshman and sophomore years and we were able to push each other,” Cune said. “I just kind of got sick and tired of diving by myself every day; then Kelsey came out and started pushing me a little bit and that really helped.”
