Mission Viejo’s Julie Handren, 16, Loves to Compete : Arc of This Diver Is Full of Fun

While diving off 10-meter platforms and hitting the water at 35 miles per hour would be more than enough excitement for most 16-year-olds, Mission Viejo’s Julie Handren can’t wait for the day she can dive from a higher object. Like an airplane.

That, along with snow skiing, water-skiing and maintaining a 3.8 grade-point average through medical school, are just a few of the challenges that she hopes to conquer someday. That is, after her diving career settles down.

And the way it’s been going, she might as well put her skis in storage.

Handren is one of the most promising members of the Mission Viejo Nadadores diving team testing their skills today through Sunday at the Western Regional Junior Olympic Championship at the Mission Viejo International Diving Complex.

The meet features age-group divers from nine states, all of whom had qualified in earlier competitions.

A big meet. A big crowd. Often they are the fuel for big butterflies in one’s stomach.

“I love it, really,” Handren said. “I love to compete.” And she obviously loves diving.

“It’s the challenge of diving off a 10-meter platform,” Handren said. “I enjoy doing things with risk involved. I guess a lot of it is about just overcoming fear.”

Not the brave words one would expect from this freckled, waif of a girl whose sun-burned nose and cheeks tell the long hours spent contemplating the space between herself and the water below.

Originally a member of the Nadadores swim team, Handren started diving eight years ago after she watched the team practicing from the high platforms.

“I thought swimming was too tedious,” Handren said. “And diving looked like so much fun. So I quit swimming. . . . I didn’t want big shoulders anyway.”

She began diving lessons and within six months had started competing in age-group events.

Handren qualified for her first Age-Group Nationals in 1983. In 1985, she made it to the Senior Nationals, being one of a very few who were under 18 years old.

Those meets, however, are not the ones that first come to Handren’s mind when she’s asked about her past competitions. She remembers instead a certain Texas hotel where she and a few diving buddies “borrowed” a tractor from a nearby farm and proceeded to plow a field.

“We got it started and were driving it around the field,” Handren said. “But we couldn’t stop it. We jumped off, but it kept going.”

The divers ran to their rooms. The next morning, everyone was asking how a tractor could have ended up on the hotel’s pool deck.

Just another day in the life of a national class diver, eh Ms. Handren?

“No,” she said. “Actually most are pretty routine. I get up at quarter of 6, go to school from 7 to noon, dive from 1 till 3, then lift weights, eat, do homework and go to bed.”

Six days a week? Nine months a year? Sounds like a little monotony might possibly be creeping in this young thrill-seeker’s life.

“No,” she said. “I have too much fun for that.”