‘Big dreams mean big work’
Catherine Ermis is seen in a pike position mid-dive at the AAU National Championships in Orlando in May 2023. (Photos Provided by Elizabeth Ermis)GREENSBORO — In a few short weeks, students in the Diocese of Charlotte will be out of the pool and back in school. But for Catherine Ermis, a rising fourth-grader at Our Lady of Grace Catholic School in Greensboro, days in the pool have only just begun.
The spirited 9-year-old is fresh off winning a gold medal in the 9 and under 3-meter springboard diving competition at the 2023 AAU National Championships in May – after just two years of training.
She is now considered among the best divers in the world for her age group.
“After winning, I felt really good. My hard work paid off!” Catherine says.
She trained before and after school for 25 to 30 hours a week leading up to the competition, working to perfect four different dives, including an inward one and a half somersault tuck, something she began working on after she qualified for the championships the month before the event.
“Big dreams mean big work,” Catherine says. “You have to do a lot of work to reach your dreams.”
After winning the gold medal, she earned a spot on the AAU national team and will compete with other young divers this fall in Ireland and Scotland.
The inevitable question about Olympic dreams comes up often. Catherine’s response? She’s focused on the national team and says the Olympics are a long time from now. She’d be aiming for the 2032 Games.
The past two years have been enough of a whirlwind for Catherine, her parents, and her five siblings. Countless hours of training, travel to national and international competitions, and appointments to keep, not to mention all the everyday joys and demands of family life.
Catherine’s mother, Elizabeth, says they wouldn’t have it any other way, noting how much her daughter loves the sport.
“I feel like I’m flying when I dive,” Catherine says.
Elizabeth says Catherine’s interest in diving began when she began heckling her older brother from the stands at his diving practice.
“She’s up there giving him a hard time about what he is or isn’t doing, and the coach said, ‘She’s mouthy. Do you think you can just come down here and show us all how to do it?’” Elizabeth recalls.
Full of spunk and confidence, Catherine accepted the challenge.
“She’s definitely the most fearless of all of my kids,” Elizabeth says. “So, anything that they would ask her to do, she was like, ‘Sure, I’ll do that.’”
At the end of a two-week diving trial, Catherine’s natural talent was evident. She began training in 2021 and participated in her first competition, the AAU National Championships in Texas, just a year later. She came in 12th out of 67 in her age group at the 2022 competition.
Then she was invited to compete at an international event in Argentina in November 2022.
By the time the qualifying event for the 2023 national championships in Orlando rolled around in the spring, Elizabeth began seeing more clearly God’s hand in Catherine’s diving career.
Wearing her gold medal on the winners’ podium at the event“We were already going to be in Florida visiting my parents. At that point, we didn’t really have solid plans to try to go to the nationals, but I said to her coach, ‘Look, this qualifier is happening. We’re already going to be there. Do you think it would be worthwhile to just go and see how she would do at another larger scale meet?’”
The coach agreed to give it a try, saying, “You never know what’s going to happen.”
“I don’t think any of us had any expectation that she would win both of the events at the qualifier and then go on to win the national meet,” Elizabeth adds.
Noting that neither she nor her husband Chris is athletic, Elizabeth says Catherine’s gift for diving is not genetic.
“I do really believe that her talent is God-given and that God brought her to diving,” she says.
Catherine adds that God helps her family in other ways too.
“We pray that I will be safe before practice and especially at meets,” she says. “It’s a lot of traveling, so we pray for safe travels.”
The Our Lady of Grace School community supports her through prayer as well, offering encouragement and cheer. When Catherine was preparing to compete in Argentina, the school’s Spanish teacher, Sheila Shearin, had the eighth-grade class create “buena suerte” posters for her.
Her third-grade teacher, Celia McMullen, and Principal Catherine Rusch have come to see her dive at practice, and Katie Houston, her first-grade teacher, who has since retired, sent Catherine a handwritten letter after seeing her success in the news.
“It feels really good to have my classmates and teachers support me,” Catherine says. “It helps me do better to know how proud they will be of me.”
— Annie Ferguson
More online
At www.catholicnewsherald: Watch the dives that earned Catherine Ermis the gold medal at the AAU National Championships in Orlando.