Dec. 2, 2008
Lobo Diving: Texas Invite, Austin, Thursday thru Saturday
By Richard Stevens — Senior Writer/GoLobos.com
Lobo diving coach Abel Sanchez calls it his “A-Team” and he is one of the As. It’s Abel, Alexandra, Aubrey, Ashlee and another Alexandra.
“I also call them the Fantastic Four,” said Sanchez, in his fifth season with the University of New Mexico swim program. “I have four really athletic divers and they are doing amazing. I think this is going to be a special year for them.”
Of course, all these Lobo As have a last name, too. It’s Alexandra Evangulova, Aubrey Bush, Ashlee Erickson and Alexandra Lusk. The Lobo divers said they enjoy being dubbed the A-team. “It’s kind of cool that we all have names that start with A,” said Bush. “We like it when he calls us the A-team.”
Said Lusk: “It’s part of being relaxed, having fun. Now, there might be some days when he calls us something else, but he never says it outright.”
Actually, Sanchez says he is more than happy with his A-Team, their work ethic and their diving ability. He looks at them as the core of a diving program that should be even stronger next season. He also said they are exactly the type of divers he recruits to New Mexico: athletes, who have the potential and the work ethic to compete at the national level.
“It’s tough to get the blue-chip divers to come here,” said Sanchez. “I usually have to identify athletes and then work to make them better. A lot of time, I’m just looking at tape. I watch a lot of tape. I look for strength, power, agility, flexibility, things like that. Once I find some, I try to go to meets to watch them. It’s tough to get divers out of New Mexico because it’s hard to get kids in New Mexico interested in diving.”
Sanchez said part of the problem is that there is only one diving club in the entire state of New Mexico. It’s called New Mexico Diving. Sanchez knows the roots of that club because he started it.
“I started with two kids about four years ago,” he said. “I have 15 to 20 kids at a meet now. It would be great if I was able to cultivate some divers in New Mexico and then keep them here.”
The UNM diving program is part of the New Mexico swim team coached by Tracy Ljone. Sanchez says he has 2.8 scholarships to work with and next season would like to have six divers on the UNM team — no offense to the Fantasic Four, which also will return intact. “Six is a great number,” said Sanchez. “I’m looking to add two quality divers for next season.”
Sanchez plucked his A-Team from various points on the globe. Evangulova is from Moscow, Russia. Lusk is a transfer from the University of Florida. Bush is a freshman from Colorado. Erickson is a freshman from Michigan. The four divers came to UNM, or came to diving, in various ways:
Alexandra “Sasha” Evangulova — Junior
Sasha Evangulova has the same problem when she goes back to Mother Russia that a lot of New Mexicans have when they go, well, almost anywhere. “When I go back to Russia, people ask me, ‘How is life in Mexico?'” she said. “I tell them I have never been to Mexico.”
Evangulova said she is very close to feeling like a New Mexican. She likes the weather. She likes the food.
“At first, I couldn’t get used to the chile,” said Evangulova. “I hated it. The weather, too. But then, what you call it? The Land of Enchantment got really enchanting. I started liking it. When I go back to Russia in the summer, by August I start thinking, ‘I’m ready to go back to New Mexico.’ I miss the green chile. I really like it now.”
Evangulova’s ties to New Mexico came through Sanchez’s ties to Russia. Sanchez, a 2000 Olympian for Peru, went to Moscow to train and met Evangulova’s father, an executive in the Russian diving federation.
“I knew Abel when I was little and coming to Russia to train,” said Evangulova. “When I was looking for a school in the U.S., he somehow found me and said, ‘Hey, come to New Mexico.’
“In Russia, we don’t have anything like college athletics. When you graduate from high school, you either chose to go professional or you stay in school. I didn’t want to quit diving and I wanted to get a degree, so I decided to come to U.S.”
Alexandra “Alex” Lusk — Junior
When you consider that Lusk’s favorite event is the platform, you can’t help but ask Sanchez how he convinced Lusk that the University of New Mexico would be a good place to transfer. Especially since UNM doesn’t have a platform to dive from. “I don’t know,” said Sanchez. “That’s a good point. I guess you need to ask her.”
OK, Alex, why did you jump from the University of Florida, which has a platform, to a dive team that doesn’t have a platform? Inquiring minds want to know!
“That was a concern,” said Lusk. “That’s probably what I enjoy doing the most, but it can’t be your specialty, if you don’t have one to train on. But Abel told me we would find a place to train, so I didn’t look at it as a big setback.”
What Lusk did like about the University of New Mexico’s diving team was the approach that Sanchez takes in developing his divers. He does a lot of it out of the water.
“I like his coaching style,” said Lusk, who wisely lists her favorite food as mom’s home cooking. “I like the way he focuses on things outside the pool that carry over to my diving. Abel understands what will help you as a diver. He has us focusing on technique and we improve our technique with acrobatics, tumbling, conditioning, stretching.”
Lusk said her career in the pool actually began as a competitive swimmer. But that board over at one end of the pool kept beckoning to her. “At the end of all my practices, I would hang around to jump off the diving board, doing flips and stuff,” she said. “I liked it, so I became a diver.”
Ashlee “Gabby” Erickson — Freshman
Much like Evangulova, Erickson’s link to UNM was through a relative who had some kind of tie to New Mexico. For Evangulova, it was a father who knew coach Sanchez. For Erickson, it was a grandfather who knew just about everybody at New Mexico.
Erickson’s grandfather is Con Colbert, a former associate athletic director at UNM under Rudy Davalos. So when Abel came calling, New Mexico wasn’t a strange place for the native of Michigan.
The bigger question was whether or not Erickson wanted to continue her love affair with a sport she had been kicking around for less than two years. “I was in gymnastics until I was 12, maybe 13,” said Erickson. “Then I quit and went back to gymnastics when I was 16.”
The return was not a good thing for Erickson’s body. She had four ACL surgeries and decided that life was easier as a student and quit athletics until her senior year at Plainwell (Michigan) High. Then she decided to try diving. It worked out well. She became a 2008 high school All-American and placed second in the 2008 Michigan State Championships.
“Diving seems to come to me naturally,” said Erickson, who said her goal is to make the NCAA Championships and “get good grades.”
Said Sanchez: “She has a lot of potential and is only getting better.”
Aubrey Bush = Freshman
It’s not exactly that Aubrey Bush has a nose for diving, but she definitely didn’t like the way her nose was treated by gymnastics. Or how her head was treated or how her body was treated.
In a way, Bush drifted from the mats and the bars and into the pool because, “a softer landing is kind of nice.” Bush was an accomplished gymnast for around 11 years but had too much of a love/hate relationship with some of the apparatus involved in the sport.
“I broke my forehead,” said Bush. “I got a fracture than ran along the top of my eyebrows.”
That blow to Bush’s head came on the uneven bars when a flip didn’t go well and her head smacked into the lower bar. But there was more to come.
“That was maybe the first straw,” Bush said of her eventual jump from mats to pool. “Then I broke my nose and then I tore some ligaments in my toes. So, I wanted to find something new. Diving is just not as much impact on your body.”
Bush said one reason she came to UNM to dive for Sanchez because “he was at my first diving meet ever.” Sanchez said his talented freshman has tremendous potential in the sport. Bush said she “really likes the tower (platform) because I guess I’ve never had any fear of heights.”
And what’s to fear in the soft landing that waits below? Not too many athletes have broken their foreheads, or their nose, on water.
Editor’s note: Richard Stevens is a former Associate Sports Editor and sports columnist for The Albuquerque Tribune. You can reach him at rstevens50@comcast.net. Previous articles are available at The Richard Stevens Corner