July 26, 2005
By Nancy Haggerty, Poughkeepsie Journal
This story can also be found here.
It's not that no one else has ever returned. But, wow, like this?
Rewind the tape to 1978, the year the Empire State Games were born. Melanie Bolstad (then Gillet) took silver and bronze in diving. Those weren't her last medals by a longshot.
But now, 16 years after she last competed and last medaled, and at an age when many talk about serious athletic competition in the past tense, the 44-year-old Highland resident is returning to the Games.
Forget the Masters division. And forget Empire coaching, which she has done.
Bolstad, head diving and associate head swimming coach at Marist College, is competing as a member of Hudson Valley's open diving team -- the same team that features two of her current Marist student-athletes.
Bolstad, the mother of three boys (18, 16 and 13) is teaming in synchronized diving with Pleasant Valley's Sheila Nieri, who learned her first dive from Bolstad and years later, at Marist, was the MAAC 1999 and 2000 diver of the year.
Synchronized diving wasn't even an event when Bolstad medaled for the Central division four straight years (1978-81 -- golds in both one- and three-meter in '80), nor when she later medaled for Hudson Valley.
And, neither Bolstad nor Nieri, who were chosen for the event after qualifying respectively for individual three- and one-meter diving, has ever competed in synchronized diving.
But under the eye of Marist swimming guru Larry VanWagner, they've crammed for the competition five days a week since mid-June, practicing eight dives they'll whittle to a best six.
Challenges ahead
"It's just a physical and mental challenge ... If I can get the harder dives down we'll do them," said Bolstad, who doesn't jump as high nor spin as fast as she did when she was named the University of Maryland's 1981 top scholar-athlete, but remains smooth entering the water.
"Our goals are to have a really good time and to try to make our timing as similar as possible -- to try to do really pretty synchronized diving," she said, terming the event crowd pleasing.
And the crowd should be large since Marist hosts.
"I have a lot of support from the people around me, who think it's a really cool idea," said Bolstad, a Marist coach since 1991. Among them are her husband, Rick, another ESG alum.
Most cheering, though, will be seeing her compete for the first time.
One spectator, Bolstad's 80-year-old mother, Agnes, who has never missed her Empire diving, hopes to watch history repeat.
"It'll be exciting," Bolstad said. "She'll be my biggest fan."
