63.0°,
Mostly Cloudy Diving right in at Newbridge Road Park pool
Town of Hempstead lessons teach proper technique for entering the water
I am 25 years old, and until recently, I had never dived into the water. Call me crazy, but the prospect of plunging headfirst into a deep pool of blue had always spurred a sense of anxiety in me. So I was more of a slowly-ease-yourself-into-the-water-stair-by-stair-while-wincing-and-complaining-about-how-cold-the-water-is kind of guy.
But after watching the Olympics, and seeing German diver Stephan Feck accomplish the rare feat of attaining a 0.0 score after executing a perfect back-flop (check YouTube if you haven’t seen it — sorry, Stephan), I figured that I couldn’t do any worse. It was time to learn to dive.
And where better to learn than the Town of Hempstead’s Newbridge Road Park pool in Bellmore, where I took my first swimming lessons as a child?
That is why, at 11:30 a.m. on a recent Thursday, I found myself at Newbridge Park, doing jumping jacks with a group of children ages 6 to 10. I’ll get back to that in a minute.
When I arrived at the pool, my first thought was that I couldn’t have asked for better weather. The sun was shining, and there was a slight breeze and no humidity –– perfect diving conditions. I met Mal McGarry, the Town of Hempstead’s aquatic coordinator, who supervises the lifeguards at the town’s 23 pools.
McGarry introduced me to Stephanie Hellemeyer, a town program coordinator and a competitive swimmer from East Meadow, and Anthony Carbone, a 19-year-old La Salle University student who coaches Newbridge’s diving team.
Newbridge is one of four town parks with diving teams, with the others being at Veterans Memorial Park in East Meadow, the Echo Park Pool Complex in West Hempstead and Oceanside Park. The teams compete in the Nassau County Swim Conference, a recreational league.
Previously, I had considered diving to be an aesthetically pleasing, but impractical approach to entering the water. But Hellemeyer and Carbone explained to me that knowing proper diving technique improves pool safety. “You hear every summer, unfortunately, about backyard incidents,” Hellemeyer noted. “It’s very important that people start putting their kids in the pool at a very young age.”
