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State championships, for any sport, are incredible opportunities for student athletes to maximize their goals and achieve their limits. Reagan Annable (10), an athlete on this year’s swim and dive team, achieved her diving goal by attaining second at the state meet and breaking the school’s record.
“I’m super happy about state. It was one of the best meets of my entire life, like, even before, like, at conference I was, like, ‘wow’ I got 460, that’s a PR, and then I ended up getting 498 at state, and I’m like, I didn’t know I would be able to do that,” Annable said.
According to her, achieving such a high goal was exciting, further instilling the belief that even over the short period of a year she could go from a score of 399 to a score of 498.
Annable said many athletes may find getting second place as the worst place to get, but she saw it as an amazing opportunity to even be able to stand next to all the other phenomenal divers.
Annable described her joy of diving and how her passion for the sport grew: “I love the feeling of diving, just, like, obviously you get really nervous when you’re on the board and you’re about to do a dive but then you’re, like, ‘I have to do this.’ You just have to go for it, and once you’re in the air and then you find your spot, and once you get in the water, (it) just feels amazing.”
Along with diving, Annable is a part of countless other groups, including Fellowship of Christian Athletes (FCA), orchestra and Key Club; however, she wants to be a collegiate diver in the future, so diving is her primary focus.
Before Annable found a place in diving, she played several other sports, one of which, most notably, was gymnastics. When she first joined the middle school swim team — then later the dive team — it suddenly clicked: she could bring her previous knowledge of gymnastics in order to help her succeed in diving.
Annable’s coach, Ryan Palmer, the diving coach for WHS and WMS, taught her for the past two years of her high school career, and he is proud of what she’s accomplished over the past year.
“She told me at the beginning of the season that she wanted to try and beat one of the records this year, and going into her last dive at state she asked how close she was to beating the school record, and I told her it didn’t matter and she had one dive left, and she needed to focusing on doing it the way she always has,” Palmer said. “And then watching her perform her last dive, it was borderline flawless, and she came out of the water, and I could see her face starting to get red, almost as if she knew how well she did that dive … It was almost as if time slowed down.”
Palmer explained that he was extremely impressed with Annable and was proud to be the coach of such a gifted athlete, knowing that her future will be bright. She has shown her knowledge of the sport not just from her personal experiences but also from the ability to pass that onto the middle school team during the past middle school swim season, which she was an assistant coach for.
Ellie Sedaghat (12), one of Annable’s closest friends, is one of her many peers who knew she could achieve her incredible goal.
“I was crying, and jumping around. I had FaceTimed some friends, and we were all screaming on the phone together and jumping, and I was crying, we were all crying,” Sedaghat said. Sedaghat is also a member of the swim team and is a violinist in the school orchestra with Annable.
The two of them have only been friends for a year, but both of them have said they felt as if it had been so much longer. A true friendship sometimes can appear in the strangest places, and Annable expressed that if Sedaghat hadn’t participated in swimming this year, she doesn’t know if she would have joined this 2023-2024 season.
From breaking records to placing at state, one thing is for sure: Annable will accomplish whatever she sets her mind to — and WHS has two more years to see what that entails.
