Ryan Ladika/MDN Bella Price poses in front of the Minot High girls’ swim & dive record board Sept. 3 after breaking the school record for diving during the Majettes’ Sept. 2 meet.

Before she made her way to the locker room following Minot High’s Sept. 2 home girls’ swim & dive meet, the first of her senior season, Bella Price sneaked a look at her final scoresheet for the evening.

She had felt a rush of confidence about her performance after completing her 11 dives, and could not wait to see the score the five judges had awarded her.

“I look and I’m like, ‘444, okay, wait, what?'”

Price dashed to the top of the oversized concrete steps that double as the seating area for fans near the entrance to the Magic City Campus’ lap pool, and glanced at the diving row of the record board entitled “MHS GIRL’S SWIMMING” that hangs on the right-hand wall.

“I go back up here and I look at the score,” she recalled. “And I’m like, ‘440, okay, is this actually, um, did I see this right?’ So I go back down and I look at my score again, and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, okay.'”

Price snatched up her scoresheet and searched for her diving coach, Barb McPeak. A trio of thoughts flew through her mind: “Woah, this is not real. No way that just happened, it’s the first home meet. This is insane.”

She found her coach and went to confirm her suspicions.

“Just out of curiosity, to beat a school record, does it have to be at a state or WDA meet?”

“No, that can be at any meet,” McPeak responded. “Why are you asking?”

“I think I may have just beat it.”

Indeed, Price’s 444.40 final score had broken the oldest record on the Minot High girls’ swim & dive leaderboard, the school diving record of 440.25 set by Jennifer Hunkele in 1983, as well as her previous personal-best of 424. In her first home meet, she had achieved a goal she had only hoped to reach by the end of the season.

“(McPeak) just jumped with excitement and she takes my sheet from me and we looked at it together,” Price said with a smile. “And I go up to my parents, and they were going crazy. My grandma was going nuts; she was more excited than me.”

The milestone is only the latest in an incredibly quick rise to diving stardom for the senior. She had only started the activity her sophomore year, but a lengthy background in gymnastics aided in picking her new sport up with relative ease.

Price, now 17, began her gymnastics career at the tender age of two years old and did not stop until she lost her passion for the sport when she turned 15. As any gymnast can attest, the beating the activity puts one’s body through can be brutal, as well.

Her skills never deserted her, though, and made her a natural fit for the diving board when she decided to follow in the footsteps of her fellow gymnasts who had tried their hands in diving.

“One of the reasons Bella scores so high is she has really good body awareness,” McPeak said. “She can get herself pretty high, and she’s not afraid of letting her body do the moves. I’m sure a lot of that came from her gymnastics background. It’s good that she found another sport that she can excel in, and I’m glad she’s here.”

In an 11-dive meet, the format in which Price broke the record, divers must complete two compatible dives for each of the five categories: forward, back, reverse, inward and twist. The 11th dive can be one of the participant’s choosing from any category, and each dive is scored based on its degree of difficulty.

“We had five judges, and we take the high and low and drop those out and use the middle three,” McPeak explained. “You take the total of those three and multiply by the degree of difficulty for the dive. A pretty basic dive might be a 1.6, it’s not going to score a lot of points. We’re looking to find those dives that are like a 2.2 or 2.3, and Bella has quite a few of those in her list.”

Of the 11 dives Price performed, seven had a degree of difficulty of at least 2.0, including each of her final three. Her forward double-somersault netted the highest score of her evening, an even 22.0, and was also tied for the second-most challenging dive by its degree of difficulty of 2.2.

While the idea of breaking the school record was planted firmly in the back of her mind as a goal she wanted to reach by season’s end, having fun and making the most of the final year of her high school diving career has been at the forefront of Price’s focus.

She has already had a lot of fun progressing through her senior year, and has then tried to implement the relaxed mindset into her diving. It helps her to stay calm during meets, and she reminds herself not to worry about mistakes she may make.

“Going into the meet, I was like, ‘We’re not going to overthink, it’s not a big deal if I mess up on things, just do what I know how to do,'” Price said. “That’s on all my dives. I know how to do everything and it’s in the back of my head. I visualize everything.”

The days after setting the new mark to beat for girls’ diving at Minot High have been a whirlwind for Price. People have flocked to congratulate her on the achievement and ask questions about a sport many are unfamiliar with, all of which Price has been happy to answer.

“It means a lot. The fact that swim & dive gets recognized a little, but I think it’s a really nice thing for our team and swim & dive in general,” she added. “Especially because that record is the oldest record on there. To renew it and have people want to know more about it is really cool to see.”

She does not yet know if she will pursue collegiate diving following her high school graduation, but after reaching her initial goal so early in the season, she has, naturally, set her sights even higher for the remainder of this year.

“I kept looking at the old record, and I was like, ‘Okay, this is going to be a goal for my whole season,'” Price recalled. “Now my goal is to go for the pool record, which is 451.45. It’s just goals on goals, just keep moving up.”