Former gymnast now gets her airborne thrills diving with the Hawks as contender for state title
Sarah Dorn took a step towards the edge of the board on a cloudy March afternoon at the Las Positas aquatics complex. The three-meter springboard began to buckle beneath her 5-foot-4 frame as she steadied herself. She held a concentrated look on her face, preparing to do a front two-and-a-half somersault dive.
Suddenly, she leapt. The birds chirped as other athletes swam in a synchronized fashion through the competition pool to the left. She broke the surface tension of the water.
Dorn,19, wants to be in the air. To defy gravity. It’s the adrenaline junkie in her, urging her to war against the pull of the Earth.
“I don’t really care if I flop,” Dorn said, “because in reality, it’s not gonna hurt that long. It just hurts for a second, like your skin kind of hurts. You’re like, ‘Damn, okay,’ and then you get up and then you kinda go again.”
This is the same rush she used to get from gymnastics. Her first love. Flipping through the air, twisting and turning. This felt like her calling. She was really good, too. Competing for Royal Gymnastics in Tracy, Dorn worked her way up to becoming a Level 10 gymnast — the last step in the USA Gymnastics Developmental Program. Her career as a gymnast ended in disappointment as a broken hand limited her final meet, only allowing her to compete in floor.
Ironically, Dorn now gets her rush off diving boards. It’s a similar feeling. Soaring in the air. Countering the gravitational pull. Turns out, she’s pretty good at this, too.
Her advanced ability showed on this practice dive. Toes pointed, shoulders broad and arms high, Dorn ripped through the water barely making a splash. It was an illustration of why she nearly won the 3C2A Women’s Diving State championship last May. She hadn’t even been in the water a year.
“She took second in state last year by less than four points,” LPC’s diving coach Monte Young recalled. “Diving against girls with 10 years of experience and she had seven, eight months.”
Dorn was shocked to finish so well at state last year. But she’s been grooming for this since she was a kid. She just switched sports. From balance beams to springboards. From leotards to dive skins. From sticking the landing to rip entries. So it won’t be a shock if she wins a state title this season.
Ok, maybe a little shocking.
“This is only, like, my second year now. So it’s just … a little bit intimidating,” Dorn said., “But honestly, as long as I’m making progress personally and, like, I have a better score personally, I don’t really care where I place.”
TOWARDS THE SKY: Sarah Dorn prepares to launch off the diving board and flip into LPC’s pool, March 20. Dorn takes her skills from competing in gymnastics to become a better diver. (Photo by Ian Kapsalis/The Express)
Growing up in Tracy, she began attending mommy-and-me classes while taking ballet lessons well before Pre-K, before she could form coherent sentences. Flipping her way through beginner classes, Dorn eventually began competing. When it came time to choose between gymnastics and ballet, she found the difficulty of the flips and techniques enticing. Dorn wanted more. She craved heights. And as an adrenaline junkie, gymnastics gave her the high she craved. She relished heights that made most cower.
“My heart was more drawn towards gymnastics,” Dorn said.
As Dorn got older, her competition became harder. Techniques more involved. Coaches more rigid. Practice became longer and more frequent. Workouts consumed her off days.
Dorn traveled from Tracy to Dublin, enduring the Altamont, six days a week for four-hour practices. As a Level 10 gymnast, her highest all-around score was a 36.850. She dreamed of becoming a D1 gymnast.
Dorn had a penchant for the bars. Her favorite skill was a Jager, where a gymnast swings backwards on a bar and then catches it after performing a somersault. While she didn’t have a particular school in mind, the academically-driven athlete had hopes of competing for UC Davis. She hoped to be an Aggie.
As graduation from Tracy High neared, her uncertainty grew with the lack of collegiate prospects. During her last practice before her final regional competition, Dorn landed awkwardly on the beam, breaking her left hand while performing a back. Her last competition representing Royal Gymnastics as an athlete. Her career felt incomplete. She was forced to hang up her leotards after 15 years of gymnastics. Heartbroken.
“It was definitely a hard stab,” Dorn recalled, “I was just like, ‘Oh man, I gotta be done now.’ ”
Like many students in California, Dorn chose to take advantage of the Promise Grant Program, providing a tuition-free education for community college students, while she contemplated her next move. While her heart was set on competing for a university with strong academics, Dorn felt it best to stay close to home, enrolling at Las Positas. Her older sister Sam went there, and for Dorn and her family, it seemed like the most logical decision.
Being bored and missing the structure of gymnastics, the biology major didn’t know how to spend her time. Being a full-time student and a coach at Royal Gymnastics wasn’t enough. She needed the high that she got from swinging through bars and flipping from beams.
It wasn’t until her sister, Sam — who swam competitively for 12 years, including at Las Positas and at the club level — suggested Dorn try out for the Hawks’ diving team. Her thirst to once again bound into the sky provoked a willingness to do anything. Even if it meant throwing herself into a pool of water nearly 10-feet deep.
“I was so bored out of my mind,” Dorn said, recalling the nudge from her sister. “She was like, ‘You should so try diving. It would be like an easy transition for you.’ ”
Easy was a bit of an understatement. Dorn learned quickly that it wasn’t just easy. She was a natural. Of course, her experience contorting her body in impressive ways as a gymnast didn’t hurt.
Coach Young said he wasn’t at all surprised with Dorn’s progress in her short time with the team. She’s an athlete. Her background in gymnastics segued perfectly into diving.
“And then she’s tough,” he said.
While the “flipping and twisting aspect” has been instrumental — and the “air-awareness,” as she calls it, was already there — Dorn still had to work out a few kinks. Old habits from her first love were dying hard.
“(Gymnasts) have some mechanics that are bad for diving,” Young said. “They’re taught to tumble.”
According to Young, gymnasts can be “impatient.” They’re trained to hit the ground fast and with force. It’s why the sport is so hard on their bodies. In diving, athletes are taught to “wait” for the board to give them their momentum. But in gymnastics, they’re forced to create their own.
“Gymnastics is, more or less, hit the mat as hard as you can and run.” Young said.
Dorn says she’s used to tumbling quickly on a springy floor, the complete opposite of the stiff, unforgiving springboard from which she now flips. She has to be a bit more delicate in her touch with the board. She also contends gymnastics made her a “bit of a perfectionist.”
“I am not very used to being patient with the board because gymnastics is so, like, hardcore,” Dorn said. “This, you have to be, like, patient and kind of gentle and wait for the board to bounce you back.”
Young says that former gymnasts often face many difficulties when making the transition to diving. Many struggle grasping new techniques and letting go of the muscle memory from their former sport. Not Dorn, Young said.
Dorn put in the work to overcome the difficulties. Her discipline and work ethic were key. The commutes to LPC during rush hour traffic. Weekend workouts. Early morning lifts. Choosing to practice her dives during Livermore’s coldest and rainiest months. It all paid off.
Before she knew it, Dorn was on the podium at the state championship, just behind American River College’s Rachel Choi, a veteran diver with nearly a decade of club experience under her belt.
“We were kind of watching the scores as we continued diving, so it showed up on, like, a little screen,” Dorn said. “At the end when I finished, I was looking at the placement and I was like, ‘Why am I kind of like high up there?’ I was like, ‘What is happening?’ ”
Maybe it was her gymnastics experience showing up on the big stage. Maybe it was a “fluke.” But Dorn says she expected to “medal.” She knew she was going to be on the podium. Just not that high.
Not her mom, though. “She was less shocked than I was,” Dorn said. “But she was definitely surprised how easy the transition was from gymnastics to diving, for sure.”
Dorn’s ability to catch on to new skills and adapt has made her unique. She didn’t have any issues learning new dives from new heights. Even the ones that made seasoned divers hesitate. She didn’t have any issues spotting — using an overhead rig and trampoline to learn new dives. It’s why she was able to learn an inward one-and-a-half Somersault Pike so easily. She outscored Choi on this dive in Costa Mesa last year.
“She has a list,” Young said, “that can compete with anyone.”
Dorn’s lone goal, she said, is to be better than last year. She works hard to divert her focus from the surrounding competition. From the reality that this is only year two of her diving journey. From the possibility of bringing a shiny new piece of gold hardware to the Hawks’ trophy case.
Instead she locks in on herself, the techniques and the thrill that makes this all worthwhile. If she doesn’t, those other factors may creep into the psyche.
“I’m a little bit scared, not going to lie,” Dorn said. “I’ve kind of looked at the divers who are competing this year, and there’s a lot of, like…Ainsley (Wade), my teammate. She was a club diver. So it’s just like they have that other like upper hand on me because I didn’t do club diving.”
Gymnastics prepared her for that, too.
The road to a state championship — and maybe even diving at her next school — is paved by discipline. Dorn’s mindset has been forged by a sport inherently regimented and microscopic in detail. She said she misses the strictness of gymnastics.
Her first love taught her the importance of stability. For Dorn, in sports and her everyday life, it’s about consistency. It’s why she coaches at the same gym where she onced tumbled. It’s why listening to Clairo and 2000s music never gets old before meets or on her commutes to Livermore. It’s why she’s always down for matcha runs and beach trips to Pacifico with her sister.
Because when you’re an expert at soaring through the air, the trick is how to stay grounded.
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TOP PHOTO: Sarah Dorn practices her dive routine in LPC’s pool on March 20. Launching off the diving board, Dorn makes several rotations midair before a rip entry into the water. (Photo by Ian Kapsalis/The Express)
Raina Dent is a Staff Writer for The Express. Follow her on X, formally Twitter, @_rainasafiya
