Submitted Photo Elizabeth Pucci-Schaefer of Fredonia will be competing at the 2022 AAU Diving National Championships beginning Sunday in San Antonio.

The AAU Diving National Championships begin this weekend in San Antonio, Texas at the Northside ISD Aquatic Center and will bring together some of the best divers in the country.

Among those divers will be Fredonia High School’s Elizabeth Pucci-Schaefer and Leah Marsh.

For Marsh it will be her first AAU meet with Pucci-Schaefer, but for Fredonia’s top diver it will be another chance this summer to bring home some medals.

In early June, Pucci-Schaefer competed at the Red-White-Blue National Championship diving meet in Morgantown, West Virginia. At that event, she took sixth in the 1-meter dive and then placed ninth in the 3-meter dive.

“That meet was a lot of fun,” Pucci-Schaefer said. “These meets are way different than the high school season. In high school, I just dive in the 1-meter against people from our area. That was only my second meet in five years doing the 3-meter. Also, going to these AAU meets, I’m meeting and competing with people from all over the country.”

Pucci-Schaefer trains all year round for diving, and in preparation for these AAU events travels from as close as Fredonia State to Iroquois High School and sometimes as far as SUNY Geneseo.

“Recently there has been a lot of travel to train,” Pucci-Schaefer added. “We haven’t been able to use Fredonia State since their COVID restrictions, but I have trained at Iroquois High School and Geneseo.”

However, ahead of this meet, Pucci-Schaefer has been able to use the facilities at Fredonia State ahead of Nationals this weekend and that’s where she’s been training all this week.

“I had a camp at Fredonia State all week,” Pucci-Schaefer said. “This week is a lot different than regular practices. There have been a lot of coaches to give different eyes on the dive and provide other ways of looking at it.”

When not at training camps, Pucci-Schaefer’s diving coach is John Crawford and he helps her perfect the details of her craft.

“He talks a lot about being brilliant in the basics of the work,” Pucci-Schaefer said about Crawford. “We work a lot on the entry and minimizing the splash. There’s also a lot of shoulder work and work on quick movements to get out of the dive.”

Pucci-Schaefer added that Crawford focuses a lot on the entry into the pool, because judges will focus more on the splash and not as much on the complexity of the dive itself.

Aside from just diving over and over again in the pool, Pucci-Schaefer has to work on her craft in other ways. There is a large emphasis on core strength and building up her endurance.

“I really like to go for runs,” Pucci-Schaefer said about her out-of-pool training. “That type of training really keeps my endurance up. Working on my core I do about 200-400 sit ups a night, depending on how sore or tired I am.”

Pucci-Schaefer will not be alone at this meet as Marsh, her Fredonia teammate, will be joining her.

“Leah is coming to Texas, too,” added Pucci-Schaefer. “She’s really fun to train with. We dive with some really good kids from all over the place.”

The meet will begin on Saturday, but the Fredonia divers won’t begin competition until early next week.

“I’m very excited to go to Texas,” Pucci-Schaefer said about competing at the AAU Diving National Championships in San Antonio. “We’ll be leaving on Sunday and competing on Tuesday and Wednesday. Right now I’m very confident going in and am feeling very good.”