This feature story is courtesy of Indiana Athletics.
This May, the Indiana swimming and diving program is highlighting its 2022 NCAA National Champions, sophomore diver Tarrin Gilliland and junior swimmer Brendan Burns, in a pair of feature stories. This story on Gilliland is the first of the series.
“Tarrin Gilliland. 407C.”
It’s the fourth round of the 2022 NCAA platform diving championship final, and Indiana sophomore Tarrin Gilliland is defending her national title. As she walks towards the edge of the tower, she is confident.
“I’m going to hit it. I’m going to hit it. I’m going to hit it,” she tells herself.
She reaches the ledge and looks down on the water 33 feet below.
“Oh gosh, what if I don’t hit it?”
Gilliland and the inward 3 ½ somersault tuck have a history. Since she was 13 years old, she had struggled with the final element, her entry into the water. In the early days, awkward landings would sometimes result in black eyes and tears streaming down her face.
Diving deeper than her back-to-back NCAA platform titles, Gilliland’s story contains years of similar mental and physical trials. As Gilliland started her collegiate career at IU in 2020, her relationship with diving was deteriorated.
“I’m very good at hiding it, unless someone actually knows me,” Gilliland said. “Throughout my [youth] diving career, [I was told that] you cannot show emotion during competition.”
And when she won the national title as a freshman, it didn’t show. But while the result was the same at the end of her first two seasons, Gilliland’s experience at each national meet was vastly different.
Her trials started at a young age.
“Throughout my life I was this prodigy that was going to go to the Olympics, and that was the main focus,” Gilliland said. “I totally lost myself throughout that whole time.”
Those expectations gave Gilliland a perfectionist mindset, causing her to worry about satisfying her coaches. If she wasn’t hitting her dives, negative self-talk would set in. Then, at 16 years old, Gilliland suffered an ankle injury during a dryland training. Motivated by a “play through the pain” mentality, Gilliland never fully recovered from the injury as she progressed through the rest of her junior career.
Despite the damaged ankle, Gilliland arrived at Indiana anxious to impress her new head coach, Drew Johansen, and satisfy the program’s rich history while also preparing for the upcoming Olympics. To compound the stress, the COVD-19 pandemic added its own obstacles. During the fall, she became a close contact and landed in the quarantine dorm. One day after being released, she was right back in following a positive test.
Gilliland grinded through her freshman season. Despite the overwhelming factors affecting her performance, she found inspiration in her team. During her junior career, she focused on winning individual awards, and she enjoyed the new opportunity to contribute to the success of the program. As the team traveled for road competitions and championships, she drew closer to her teammates.
One of the highlights of Gilliland’s freshman season was not her own achievement. Tears of joy rolled down Gilliland’s face when fellow freshman Anne Fowler clinched her Big Ten 3-meter springboard title. “She did it!” Gilliland exclaimed as Fowler nailed her final dive.
As hard as Gilliland tries, it’s not easy to hide your feelings when you’re training with the same group of athletes most days of the year. Traveling with Fowler to the NCAA Championships now two years in a row, the two have gone through their entire collegiate careers together. Side-by-side, they have experienced fears and doubts, high and lows.
A year later, Gilliland is a leader on the team. With talented freshmen like Carson Tyler and Quinn Henninger on the men’s side qualifying for the national meet, Johansen said the wisdom she can impart as they make the transition to collegiate diving is invaluable.
This fall, the team added another championship-level diver in Kristen Hayden. Gilliland said the joy Hayden brings to the program made her a welcome addition.
“I knew her from [synchronized diving] camps, and she was always so nice and so positive. And when Drew (Johansen) asked, ‘What do you think about Kristen?’ I was like, ‘Oh yeah, bring her on the team!'” Gilliland said emphatically. “She has always been a positive person to be around, and I think she fits really well with the team.”
All this camaraderie has created a family atmosphere in the IU diving well, Johansen said.
“They just care so much about each other,” Johansen said. “It has been great to watch this group come together. They’re a special bunch.”
Going into the final day of the 2021 championships, Gilliland was motivated by the opportunity to help her team with a strong performance in her best event. As she saw her name rise up the leaderboard, her competitiveness took over. In the end, she earned the women’s swimming and diving program 20 points towards its top-15 finish.
It was a good end to a grueling season, but the high didn’t last. Amid high-intensity competition, she had aggravated the injury in her ankle. With Olympic trials looming, she questioned if it was all worth it. She met with Jenny Johansen, Drew Johansen‘s wife, to express her feelings.
“I was just saying how unhappy I was and how this injury was really taking everything out of me,” Gilliland said. “I think after NCAAs, after that high, I just said, ‘I don’t really want to dive anymore. I’ve had my fun. I’ve done this for so many years, and I don’t get the point of it anymore. I’m not going to get anything out of it.'”
As the decision weighed on Gilliland, Johansen hoped to relieve some of the pressure by reminding her that she would not be letting him down if she chose not to compete.
“I don’t need you to do this for me,” Johansen told her. “If you’re going to do it, it has to be for you.”
The decision came down to the final hours. During her last practice before the deadline to enter Olympic trials, the pain in Gilliland’s ankle had risen enough to convince her to take a break from diving.
In the months following as she watched her friends and IU teammates experience the Olympics, she wasn’t sure at first if she had made the right decision. It was hard to process her conflicting emotions, and she struggled to answer friends who asked her about it.
“I was just trying to brush off the fact that I could have gone, but I didn’t want to admit that to myself,” Gilliland said. “I wanted to admit that I wanted to quit instead of going.”
But as time passed and the Olympics came and went, the benefits of her decision started to show.
Instead of venturing across the world, she was traveling home to see family. Instead of leaping from a sore ankle, she was giving it the rest it needed. Instead of prioritizing diving, she was putting herself first. Gilliland turned down an opportunity that many athletes can only dream of and came away happier and healthier.
“It saved my career.”
As her 2021-22 sophomore season approached, the trauma of the years before and the happiness Gilliland found outside diving caused her and Johansen to rethink their approach to training. If she was going to continue her diving career, something had to change.
Most notably, expectations went out the door. Now, when she trains, her mind isn’t on the Olympics or even next year’s NCAA and conference championships. She just wants to have a great day today.
“If we can do that and go to bed feeling good about ourselves and healthy, then when we wake up tomorrow, we’ll probably be able to do it again,” Johansen said.
If she is having a bad day? They manage it. Johansen has given Gilliland the freedom to take the time she needs to address the demands of being a student-athlete. Through the trials, they have built a healthier relationship, and it has paid off.
“I’m just so happy to see her happy,” Johansen said. “My job is to keep her that way, and I think if I can, she’ll continue to dive great.”
A year after skipping the Olympics, Gilliland’s second straight national title is not again a rare joyful moment during an otherwise grueling season. Instead, it’s a celebration of Gilliland’s transformation. She’s no longer just a champion diver. Gilliland is a joyful diver with a community of support around her at IU.
“This year was the first year that I allowed myself to smile after a good dive,” Gilliland said. “It felt great, I’ve never done that before.”
So, as the self-doubt creeped in on top of the tower this March, she turned her back on it, her IU family behind her.
Gilliland takes a deep breath and lifts her arms into the air. She leaps, tucks, rotates one, two, three and-a-half times, pulls out and slips into the water with a subtle splash.
Watching from the deck, Fowler and Hayden go nuts.
“Awards?”
The raucous applause goes quiet.
“Nine! Nine-and-a-half! Nine! Nine! Nine! Nine! Nine!”
86.40 points. It’s the best dive of her program.
She smiles as she makes eye contact with her coach. One word expresses her feelings in this moment.
“Finally.”
For more information on Gilliland’s 2022 NCAA platform diving title, read the recap here.