If diving conjures up images of tiny, serene women sliding silently into splash-less blue water you have not seen the 2008 NCAA 1-meter champion. University of Hawai'i junior Emma Friesen is a big bundle of focused yet frenetic energy before, during and after every dive.

"What she gets rewarded for is her strength and how high she jumps," said UH diving coach Mike Brown. "Sometimes she is very accurate ... I hope most of the time. She's a dynamic diver, very powerful."

Adds his assistant/wife, Anita Rossing, a two-time Olympic diver for Sweden: "It's Emma's presence. She'll walk out on the board and you can already see, here comes something good. She's upright ... she looks focused and ready."

"Like, 'I'll run over anybody to get to that point,' " Brown concludes, grinning. "If she were a football player, she'd be a linebacker."

Friesen, from Canada, and freshman Daniella Nero, the Swedish 3-meter junior champion in 2007, will represent the Rainbow Wahine at NCAA Zone E qualifying. It begins today in Austin, Texas, and ends Saturday. Nationals start next Thursday at College Station, Texas.

Friesen has won the Western Athletic Conference 1-meter all three years (and 3-meter this year), but her NCAA performance came as something of a surprise, particularly to herself.

At last year's zonal she fell off the 1-meter board, crashing and burning down to 22nd. She salvaged a spot at nationals by digging out her old 3-meter list, which she had not performed since injuring her shoulder two months earlier, and earning her NCAA invitation on the higher board (she won both the 1- and 3-meters this year in the WAC).

Then she mowed everybody over the next week on her specialty, successfully negotiating the fine performance line of being "in the moment even when you are so nervous your body is shaking." She had the highest score of the competition on the dive that destroyed her at zonals.

It was a huge step for Friesen beyond the obvious, going back to when she first moved to Manoa.

"I was an emotional wreck when it came to diving when I left Canada," Friesen admits. "I didn't really know I wanted to do it anymore. I was just in a weird place like everybody is when they leave high school. It was just trying something new and figuring it out. Re-learning how to love the sport again was a big part of it."

She had injured herself hitting the board "a few times" in high school — enough to let fear creep into her focus. She cried at competitions and lost her passion until last year. "There has been a huge progression in the last year and a half," Friesen said.

She traces her comeback to that shoulder injury last January, which caused "everything to fall apart" at zonals. Overnight she found focus in her frustration and "didn't worry about what not to do" on a 3-meter board she had not seen in months.

"It didn't matter that I hadn't dove in however long on 3-meter," Friesen said, the linebacker mentality kicking in. "I was going to qualify. I got back to where I used to be. I was like, 'I'm going to do this and nothing is going to stop me.' It was very weird that everything had to fall apart for it to come together."

Friesen also took sixth at 3-meters last year to become Hawai'i's first Women's NCAA Diver of the Year, and capture the Joe Kearney Award, given to the the WAC's top female athlete. She had shoulder surgery after finishing fifth at the Canadian Olympic Diving Trials. She contemplated red-shirting, but regained her form quickly and had a personal best at WAC Championships.

Her passion for diving did not start with her parents, though mother Christine was a U.S. national champion and father Ron was an Olympic diver for Canada. "They didn't encourage her so much," Brown said, "but they supported her a lot."

Instead, a friend convinced her to give the sport a try. Politics invaded the soccer game she loved at age 14, about the time she competed in her first international diving meet. Friesen committed to diving full-time.

Apparently, she has the perfect "linebacker" personality for the pool.

"You have to be a bit of an adrenalin junkie to be an athlete, and especially to be a diver," Friesen said. "There's always something to learn ... new dives, then improving, then when you compete and do them well, that's like another adrenalin rush. It's an addiction. All sports are mostly the same. You have to have an obsessive personality to be really good at them — be addicted to some part of it that lets you do it constantly.

"And then there's the friendships you make over time. It's not something that's easy to leave."

The linebacker has a soft spot. She is familiar with many of the divers, particularly those who red-shirted the Olympic year and are back now. The NCAA's and Zonals are a free-for-all this year, with consistently amazing scores from all over.

"It's all going to come down to who does it in the meet," said Friesen, who plans to train for the next Olympics. "Who figures it out on that day in that time and place."

NOTES

UH graduate QiongJie Huang, who accepted a position as U.S. National Diving Team Auxiliary Coach at the National Training Center last year, was the 2005 NCAA 1-meter champion and eight-time All-American.