Diving club and coaching in Tyler Texas

Question
Tom - I am recruiting a person to work for my company in Tyler, Texas.  She has a 13 year-old daughter that is into competitive springboard diving where they live now and she is apparently pretty good.  Having a program or diving club is a prerequisite for accepting the job.  I've not been able to locate any programs in East Texas.  Are you aware of any programs, clubs etc that are in the Tyler-Longview area in East Texas?

Answer
I wish I had better news for you Mike, but the closest city with diving teams is going to be in Dallas. This is because the pool in your town is too shallow for diving. The YMCA is the only pool I could find in your area and they do not have any competitive aquatic programs because of its small size.

The Dallas area has some of the best diving programs in the US. The problem is that Tyler is 100 miles from them. Perhaps you could convince this family to live half way between Tyler and Dallas (Canton looks like it is about half way).

Here are some websites to go to (or maybe you already have) to find out more about diving in Dallas:

swimmersguide.com - This is where I found the YMCA in Tyler. Easy to navigate to find any pool in the world.

usadiving.org - Click on Join USA Diving and then Find A Club. Enter TX and a list of teams will come up. SMU has a good team for kids as well as the team in Grapevine.

aaudiving.org- Other National Governing Body like USA Diving. Not as easy to use to find teams/pools as other websites I have listed.

divemeets.com - Click on Find and then pools. A list of all major pools with diving teams will come up. Also click on Teams under Find. A huge list will come up. Look under AAU Diving at the top of the page for teams in TX. Scroll way down to USA Diving and do the same thing. You can also click on Divers under Find and look up her daughters competitive history. If her daughters name does not appear, then she is probably just pretty good at recreational competitive diving (like country club or summer rec leagues).If her name does appear, then she has a major competitive history because if you are any good at diving, you will have dived in meets run by this website.

diving.about.com - Site that explains the sport. If you want to find out more about how diving works, this is a great site to learn.

You will have to do a lot of convincing on this recruit to drive to Dallas to dive. If they are really into the sport, they won't let the distance stop them from moving to Tyler. I know of families with successful divers who have driven farther. Good luck.