Professor impresses at local pools with her dives

Diving lessons and math class aren’t so different for Jennifer Ruef. 

Since 2016, the associate professor of education has taught and studied mathematics instruction at the University of Oregon. Off campus, the 57-year-old is just as often found on the diving board, her twists and tucks turning heads at Eugene’s swimming pools. 

Ruef started diving only 15 years ago. But Amazon Pool and Willamalane Park Swim Center have become her second classrooms — places where she is both student, training herself toward personal athletic goals, and teacher, coaching kids through their first dives.

“You’re a diver, you’re going to smack,” Ruef said at Amazon Pool on a hot day in late August, using the diver term for bellyflops. “It’s just part of learning. An answer, right or wrong, is just the beginning of a conversation about how you’re thinking about math.”

Ruef has competed in the novice U.S. Masters Diving summer championships for four straight years, competitions she jokingly described as “diving for old people.” The organization holds two annual meets — in spring and summer — for adults over 21, with novice events and open events by age group.

She competes on 1-meter and 3-meter springboard and 5-meter platform, with a routine of five dives. For the first, inward pike, Ruef leaps off the springboard facing away from the water and bends at the waist to touch her toes. Her second dive adds a half-twist to the same set-up.

She faces the front of the water and somersaults 1.5 times for her third. Her fourth begins similarly, but swaps the somersault for a half-twist. And Ruef’s last dive — her favorite — begins with an armstand off the board and flows into a somersault midair. It can only be done off the platform.

“You really have to go in like, ‘I’m just here to dive the best dive that I can dive,’” Ruef said. “I’m competing against myself and maybe one other person.”

Though Ruef downplays the intensity of the competitions, she trains year round. She takes high-intensity interval training classes at UO’s recreation center to strengthen her core, shoulders, legs and neck, all necessary for “punching a hole” in the water, she said.

Ruef trains on UO’s 1-meter springboard September through June. Preparation for her platform dives can begin only when Amazon Pool’s platform opens in the early summer. Then, she’s there every chance she gets, starting slowly as her body adjusts.

“I’ll start with basic dives, and then I’ll try to add one of the harder dives each practice, so that by the time I’m getting close to nationals, I’m able to do my full list,” Ruef said. 

Her performance at meets, she said, often reflects everything else happening in her life — plus the unpredictability of relying on springboards to function properly. When she peers over her toes into the water on competition day, she still sometimes gets nervous. 

That’s when Ruef reminds herself to “dive like a diver,” a phrase that grounds her both in form and purpose. Then she imagines her nervous energy condensing into a ball in her solar plexus, like a nuclear reactor core.

That visualization comes from her two decades as an amateur aerialist in Wisconsin, performing midair on trapezes and silks in a community-led troupe. Compared to descending a rope 80 feet in the air during a show, she said, diving nerves don’t feel as intimidating.

Ruef has loved being in motion, especially spinning, her whole life. As a little girl, she treasured the feeling of “flying” over the water when she jumped off the 3-meter springboard at her hometown’s outdoor pool in central Wisconsin. Later on, she took ballet, then modern and aerial dance.

When Ruef learned she had autism about two years ago, she came to recognize her fondness for spinning as a kind of stimming, a repetitive movement that feels grounding and soothing.

“The best way I can describe the feeling in my body is if you took a wash rag that’s full of dirty old water, and then you just twist and wring,” Ruef said. “My body feels like, if there’s any icky thing, it just kind of squeezes out of me.”

Ruef didn’t return to diving until graduate school. While earning her doctorate at Stanford University, she took a swim conditioning class at the world-class aquatics facility there.

“I was like, ‘Oh man, I just really want to be in that water,’” Ruef said of the diving well. “It’s this perfect square of aquamarine blue, and it looks so inviting.” 

She signed up for a class in diving, which met twice weekly, then joined the university’s masters team, practicing as often as she could. Ruef left California for her job at UO, but she usually returns to the state for about a week before national competitions to work with a diving coach.

She said it took years for her to convince Eugene pool staff to allow her to practice her full repertoire, due to safety concerns, but her persistence paid off. And in time, she found a community. 

“I get a lot of love, as a diver, from other pool patrons,” Ruef said in an email. “People seem to appreciate seeing an older human diving and sometimes ask for advice.”

She started offering beginner diving lessons to children ages 7 to 15 at Amazon Pool in July, about a year after she started offering lessons at Willamalane last summer. Ruef brings the same approach to the lessons as she does her math instruction studies. 

Ruef believes children are skilled problem solvers. She recalled a student who froze on the diving board but taught himself strategies to overcome his fear, like yelling and practicing his form from the edge of the pool.

She also emphasizes connecting mind with body. On the diving board, students mimic her motions; during math classes Ruef has studied and taught, students stand on a number line to act out addition, subtraction and multiplication.

She ends lessons with high-fives, asking students to name something they’re proud of before handing responsibility back, telling them, “You are now your own coaches.”

Students have embraced that. As reporters left the pool, one boy stopped to make them an offer: “If you wanna learn how to do a front flip, I can teach you.”