Imagine a diving judge only being able to watch the end a front approach and hurdle, and having one individual cover their eyes as they are watching the diver enter the water, all the while having another person shake the judges’ head back and forth.
Now imagine having to adequately, and fairly score a contest with these distractions!
Many times that is what the NISCA High School All-American Selection Committee feels like while reviewing and scoring DVD’s submitted in consideration for All-American status.
The reason for this ... inadequate filming and editing of the diving footage.
What is NICSA and Choosing All-Americans
The NISCA High School All-American Selection Committee is tasked with choosing the top 200 high school divers - 100 girls and 100 boys, who will receive All-American awards. These divers represent the top 1% of all high school divers in the nation who compete in interscholastic competition while in grades 9-12. The process to this end involves reviewing submitted applications and DVDs that include individual competition footage, scoring that competition, and then ranking each of the divers.
NISCA, which is an acronym for the National Interscholastic Swimming Coaches Association, chooses a committee of up to 20 former divers and coaches to review this diving footage, and just as in a real meet on the pool deck, score the divers and their DVDs over a three-day period.
Good DVDs vs. Bad DVDs
Scoring between 500 to 600 divers is not an easy task, and the wide variety of videos only complicates the process.
On the pool deck during a competition, all the variables are essentially the same, and the judges all view the divers under the same conditions.
Not so during this process, and the discrepancy between good and bad videos can affect the overall scoring. As with most athletics contests, despite the contradictions and problems, the athlete with the best performance usually wins, and in this case, those divers who should be included on the All-American list, for the most part are. There are cases though, in which the video footage does affect the overall score by as much as 70 points!
Common Video Mistakes
Here are a few of the more common mistakes made by those who are filming and editing the competition footage:
- Poor lighting quality.
- Zooming in too tight on the diver.
- Camera too far a way from the diver.
- Bad angle for viewing the diver (the footage should be shot from the perspective of the judge).
- Camera is looking down onto the diver (instead of being on the pool deck).
- Hand held camera (the camera should be on a tripod).
- Camera follows the diver instead of standing still.
The only way to create the perfect video and DVD is to control all the conditions that surround the contest. This is not going to happen, but in order to create a level playing field – or in this case a smooth water surface, here are guidelines that will help each diver, coach, parent, or video expert eliminate many of the errors listed above, and create the best footage and DVD possible!
Diving Video Best Practices