Barrington’s Presmyk repeats as MSL champ

The Mid-Suburban League boys diving championships Friday at Barrington were not for the faint of heart.

Senior Nolan Presmyk ended up repeating as conference champion, and his comfortable 35-plus point margin of victory suggests he was in command the whole way.

Not exactly.

Presmyk won with 383.25 points, and Conant’s John Maevski nailed his final dive for 347.90, just ahead of Hoffman Estates’ Nick Cannella (347.60).

Buffalo Grove senior Julian Vasquez finished fourth at 344.55 — and here’s where it gets unusual.

Vasquez was leading after eight rounds when an error was discovered on his dive list. He had exceeded the allowed degree of difficulty on his last three listed dives. The only remedy was to record his Round 9 dive as a fail-dive, meaning Vasquez got zero points for it.

That helped Presmyk into the lead, and he executed all three of his own final dives well to claim victory.

“You hate to see any fellow diver have a fail-dive,” said Presmyk.

The arc of Presmyk’s performance wasn’t exactly smooth sailing, either. He struggled through the first five rounds before regrouping and staging a strong comeback.

“I felt like I wasn’t all there at the beginning,” said Presmyk. “Between rounds I was able to take a shower, kind of get my head together and refocus. After that, I was fine.”

Maevski made a recent alteration to his final dive, a reverse-and-half inward, tuck position. He’d been doing the dive in the pike position until recently, but drew mostly 6s for the final dive of his MSL career and his best finish at the league meet.

Hoffman coach Dawn Engels was thrilled with the efforts of Canella and his teammate Jimmy Kazakos, who finished fifth (336.90).

“Nick is really intense about diving, and sometimes if he’s not diving well, it can kind of be a self-fullfilling prophecy with him,” Engels said. “With Jimmy, if he’s having fun, he’s going to dive well — and he was really having fun today.”

Vasquez, a standout gymnast who didn’t begin diving until his sophomore year, was disappointed by the odd turn of events. But he was also pleased with his strong performance.

“My weakness has been with the longer list, so to be leading, that felt great,” said the Bison senior.