By Dan Plouffe
A month after turning 15, Nika Ashoori made her debut at Diving Canada’s Senior Nationals on Friday at the Gatineau Sports Centre – a milestone moment the Ottawa National Diving Club athlete made sure to fully savour.
“I always thought it would be really cool” to compete at the senior level, Ashoori smiles. “I do my junior nationals, but this is such a big deal. There’s girls in their 30s here, there’s Olympians here, and being able to consider myself in that group is really amazing.”
Ashoori’s rookie performance on the senior stage wasn’t her best day on a diving board – her 166.10-point total did net her a top-10 out of the 11 athletes entered in the women’s 1-metre springboard event, won by Montreal’s Amélie-Laura Jasmin at 268.75 – but that wasn’t really the point.
“I was very nervous,” signals the Grade 10 John McCrae Secondary School student. “Going in, I knew I was the youngest, so I wasn’t expecting too much. I knew I wasn’t going to be the one jumping into the lead or whatever, but I tried to keep a positive attitude and see what happened.”
Qualifying and getting to compete at the Senior Nationals represented an early reward in Ashoori’s budding diving career. Ontario’s 2024 spring provincials under-15 girls’ 3 m champion wasn’t entirely sure she was ready for the senior stage, but with the meet taking place next door in Gatineau, it was an opportunity she couldn’t pass up.
“It felt so different” from past meets, Ashoori indicates. “It felt like so much more of a big deal. The people here are people I’ve seen on TV screens my whole life. Being there and competing with them was so unreal.”
Ashoori had TV cameras on her at the event too. She’s one of four teenaged athletes from different parts of Canada who are being followed by a Wookey Films crew for an upcoming Télévision française de l’Ontario (TFO) documentary.
Alongside others from Toronto and Winnipeg, the crew visits Ashoori several times each month to showcase the ups and downs young athletes experience while chasing their sports dreams.
“Something that I’m trying to show is basically that no athlete will say 100% of the time that they want to be there every day,” Ashoori highlights. “But I think any time an athlete feels like they want to quit, they need to take a step back and remember why they’re doing their sport.”
Ashoori has experienced times where she’s felt frustrated and wanted to give up, but she says working her way past those hurdles has ultimately helped her development. She remembers the first time she got a mental block and was unable to perform one of her dives whenever she tried. It happened one month away from her big junior nationals competition.
“I was freaking out. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to fix it,” Ashoori recalls. “My coach at the time, Brennan (Villemaire), he tried to make me feel better. He was like, ‘The more you push it, the worse it gets.’
“I’m just such a competitive person that it was hard for me to take a step back and just leave it for a little bit. But once I got it back, it’s one of my favourite dives now.”
Not getting too wrapped up in negatives proved to be a fruitful learning for Ashoori at last year’s Spring Provincials as well. She had a “rough” competition in her each of her age group events, but then wound up qualifying for the Senior Nationals thanks to a strong performance in the open women’s 1 m. Ashoori placed fifth, sandwiched between ONDC teammate Audrée Brazeau-Howes (now an NCAA diver at the University of Louisville) and the Nepean-Ottawa Diving Club’s Ella Lindsay, who’s represented Canada internationally.
“I think it’s important to not always look to the goals,” reflects the diver who placed ninth on platform at the 2024 Speedo Junior Elite National Championships in Saskatoon. “Yes, you want to keep going for your goals, but without a reason to why you started, without remembering why you do it and why you love it, you’ll never be able to keep doing it for a long time.”
Ashoori has adored the water and swimming since she was very young. She got into diving at age 7, sparked by a friend who was a high-level diver.
“I would love watching her, so my dad put me into it, but I was so scared my first time,” Ashoori recounts. “They brought me kicking and screaming, but once I dove, I looked at my mom, and I gave her the thumbs up, like, ‘I love this. I’m doing this forever.'”
Ashoori now dives six days a week for a total of 14 hours at the Nepean Sportsplex pool, and she also serves as a popular coach to young ONDC divers just starting out in the sport on Wednesday nights. And she has a final 2.5-hour dryland session on Sunday afternoons at Rideau Gymnastics, which was her first sport before she got into diving.
“My friends ask me: ‘I don’t understand how you do all this stuff,'” Ashoori notes, “but I tell them, ‘Once you do something long enough, it just becomes habit.'”
Ashoori’s main long-term goal is to dive in the NCAA – a dream inspired in part by other local divers like Brazeau-Howes, Utah’s Kathryn Grant and Paris 2024 Olympian Kate Miller of the University of Southern California, who earned a silver medal at the Senior Nationals in the women’s 10 m event.
“I know I still have time, but I would really love to go to the States,” Ashoori underlines. “I loved growing up with older girls who were always really good. It’s so nice when you have someone older to look up to and to try to be like that person.”
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