Lovejoy High School’s nationally ranked platform diver continues to find success
LUCAS, Texas — Maria Faoro is a fourteen-year-old diver with Dallas Metroplex Diving, as well as being a freshman member of both the diving and track teams for Lovejoy High School. Maria attended the USA Diving Junior Regional Championship and qualified as the regional champion. In August she competed at the USA Diving Junior National Championships, where she was ranked 10th in the nation.
Maria said, “I love how diving is a unique sport. People always ask how I can do the stuff that I do! Also, I love how dynamic our practices are. We are always working on different drills and are always ready to learn new dives.”
In addition to diving, Maria also competes on the Lovejoy High School track team. “I am a sprinter and I have run the 100m, 4x100m, 100m hurdles, and 300m hurdles. I only run track with our Lovejoy team and I cannot wait to compete again,” said Maria.
One of Maria’s biggest challenges she faces in diving is usually the mental aspect of the sport. “Mental blocks with the new dives are the toughest challenge in diving for me. It is up to me to work on my mindset and figure out strategies that work best for me to overcome these obstacles,” Maria said. The best advice she has been given is that it takes several misses to get a skill down, so do not get frustrated if it is not performed perfectly the first time.
When she is not competing, Maria likes spending time with her family and friends, as well as playing with her two dogs, Ella and Pepa. She also loves to perform volunteer work and help serve her community through her involvement with the National Charity League.
While Maria is outgoing and loves to meet new divers at the diving competitions, outside of that arena she is a bit shy around people she does not know. Some of her favorite things include snacking on Goldfish and fruit, as well as listening to The Weekend before competitions, and Eminem during competitions to keep her pumped up and ready to go.
As she has learned, things do not always go as we hope or expect sometimes. During one competition she attended, she “had a mental block on a dive and wasn’t able to prepare for it in the weeks leading up to the meet. At the meet, I didn’t do well on the dive. My coach told me to just forget about the dive and to move on to hit the next dive to make up for the lost points. And that’s exactly what I did. I hit the next dive better than I have ever performed it and that dive qualified me for Nationals. So now if something goes wrong, I just need to turn the page and come out stronger.”
Maria’s personal goals are to get stronger every year so she can go to state and represent her high school as best as she can. She also looking a little further into the future and hopes to “get onto a D1 diving team in college, and who knows, maybe even go to the Olympics one day!”
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