This story is featured in the February 2025 print edition.
Three weeks away from one of the biggest diving competitions of his life, Justin Dolezal was sidelined with a concussion. But you wouldn’t know it from his demeanor.
Dressed in Cal Poly gear, the biology sophomore grinned as he opened the gate to the Anderson Aquatic Center pool on Cal Poly’s campus.
The diving boards occupying the left side of the pool beckoned, but to Dolezal, they were considered off-limits this week.
Dolezal was in the midst of preparation for this year’s Big West Diving Championships when he hit his head on the board attempting a gainer flip — or a backflip going forward.
“That was a stupid one though,” Dolezal said about the dive.
A self-described “adrenaline junkie,” Dolezal got into diving for fun but ended up falling in love with the sport over time.
“Most people are scared of it,” Dolezal said. “I get a stupid grin when I’m doing something crazy. You’ve got to have some control of your emotions in order to become a good diver. You have to look at something hard and go: I could end up being hurt, but I’m going to try it anyway.”
Dolezal picked up diving as a 16-year-old sophomore at San Luis Obispo High School. His athletic background as an elite trampolinist helped him develop into one of the best divers in the Big West Conference.
As a freshman, he turned heads by placing third in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation Diving Championships. With his performance, he became the first Mustang diver to reach the podium in the championships.
Dolezal holds the program record for the highest finish in a conference championship, one of many times his name appears in the Cal Poly record books.
“I was so proud of him,” Cal Poly Diving coach Laurel Abernethy said. “Last year, he worked really hard. He tried really hard. He broke a lot of records.”
To Abernathy, Dolezal’s infectious positive attitude has brought the rest of the team’s performance up with him since he arrived on campus.
They both joined Cal Poly in the fall of 2023, Dolezal coming from San Luis Obispo High School and Abernethy coming from Utah, where she had been an assistant diving coach at BYU.
Abernethy didn’t help with recruiting Dolezal’s freshmen class, so that fall was the first time she had ever interacted with him.
“Immediately, I knew he was the type of kid that you could give a hard time and joke around with, and he was serious, but not too intense,” Abernethy said.
Diving is a small collegiate sport; there are eight divers in the Cal Poly program.
“We’re all super tight-knit,” Dolezal said. “It was super cool to just walk into college and already have seven friends.”
Abernethy recalled a time in last year’s championships when he began shouting a bird call as an encouragement to divers on the board instead of a normal cheer.
“You could see every kid on the board just kind of smile, and he’s even encouraging his competition as well,” Abernethy said. “We started calling him Big Bird after that.”
The bird call caught on, and Abernethy kept hearing it after the championships.
How Dolezal went from gymnast to diver
A lot of the mental challenges that go into being a successful gymnast translate easily to the diving board.
“It’s a lot of challenging yourself, and it’s a lot more mental than you would think,” Dolezal said. “Most people find a front flip scary. I’m doing four of those.”
The mechanics that go into a successful dive are different from a trampoline, but the air awareness that Dolezal possesses is a hard skill to teach.
He was first introduced to diving when Jerry Damron, his high school’s swimming coach at the time, cold-called him to convince him to join the team.
In 2022, Damron was briefly the Cal Poly Diving coach, which made joining the Mustangs an easy choice for Dolezal.
Since choosing the program, Dolezal has been a dedicated student of the sport, often going to Abernethy with questions about his form or other divers he hopes to learn from.
“We have a lot of in-depth talks about the mechanics and stuff,” Abernethy said.
His attention to the minute details of a dive has allowed him to separate from the pack and surpass divers who have been competing for more than twice as long as him.
It’s hard to catch a moment with Dolezal where he isn’t laughing or cracking a joke, but he gets serious when describing his dedication to his diving career.
“Diving is very weird, you’re trying to perfect one second of time,” Dolezal said. “It’s not like other sports where it’s a prolonged period of time, like a soccer game, where you get two hours. It’s one second six times, so it’s very precise, and it has to be mastered to do it well.”
Dolezal’s standout freshman season
Everything went right for Dolezal in his first season with the Mustangs.
He set top-five program marks in the one-meter, three-meter and platform dives and ended the year high on an MPSF Championship podium finish.
Nagging head and back injuries have slowed his progress in his second season, although he has still put together strong results over the year.
His best performance came in the Lumberjack Invite this past November, where he reset his own personal best in the platform dive by securing a 265.20, good for second in program history.
Even though he can’t dive at the moment, Dolezal still attends every practice, looking to learn and mentally prepare for upcoming competitions.
“I think I’ve gotten a lot better,” Dolezal said. “I know I can hit the dives better, and it’s coming along awesome. Plus, my coach is working really hard on me, so I think it’s coming along.”
One of Dolezal’s goals is to catch 2022 Cal Poly graduate and former diver Max Powell in the record books.
Powell holds the program records for the one- and three-meter dives, in which Dolezal has climbed to second and fourth all-time.
“I’m less than 50 points off, and I have two years to get it,” Dolezal said. “My inspiration is probably that I don’t like to lose. I don’t think most people do.”