Sister Act 3: Reagan Patterson wins family’s first KHSAA diving title, sets state record
At the age of 4, Reagan Patterson found her way to diving simply because it’s what her older sister did.
Now a junior at Madison Southern, she’s the 2023 girls’ KHSAA state diving champion and holds the state record with a score of 512.50.
Until this year, sisters Flanary, Lainey and Reagan had earned a combined 13 top-10 KHSAA state diving championship finishes but never the top prize.
When Flanary, the eldest, was 8 years old, she joined the Arlington Swim and Dive team in Richmond.
“Flanary did really, really well,” said Jud Patterson, the girls’ father and also Madison Southern’s diving coach. “The first year she ever dove, she won every meet that she entered and she won the conference at the end of the year. At the end of it, she asked us if she could keep doing it. I wasn’t a diver, their mother’s (Brandi) not a diver. We didn’t know much about diving.”
Around the same time, the University of Kentucky had hired a new head diving coach in Ted Hautau. Hautau was reigniting the Kentucky Diving Club, and the Pattersons did their research.
“We found him online, got in contact with him and entered Flanary onto that team,” Jud Patterson explained. “And that just kind of sucked our life into a different trajectory altogether. It made sense for us to have all the girls try it. Flanary was 8, Lainey was 6 and Reagan was 4, or thereabouts. So Reagan has been diving since she was 4 years old. They’ve done year-round diving as their sport. For Reagan, virtually her whole life.”
Flanary, who graduated from Madison Southern in 2020, is now a junior diver at Eastern Carolina University. At Madison Southern, she was a five-time KHSAA state finalist, including a pair of second-place finishes in 2017 and 2020.
Lainey, who graduated from Madison Southern in 2022, is now a freshman at UK where she’s a manager for the UK diving team. Lainey made eight KHSAA state diving appearances in her career, including two career-high sixth-place finishes in 2020 and 2022.
This year’s KHSAA state diving competition was the first one Reagan has faced without one of her sisters competing alongside her. But her sisters, both Flanary and Lainey, as well as their sister Rosie, a sixth-grader, supported her every step of the way.
“They were all excited,” Reagan Patterson said. “They were freaking out for me. And they were rooting for me. They were giving me advice the whole way through, which really helped.”
After finishing second in 2021 and third last year, Reagan finally came out on top.
Ahead of her final dive, she was down eight-and-a-half points to Cooper’s Peytton Moore. Moore was the reigning back-to-back champion.
“The way she did it was even more important,” Jud Patterson said. “She dove before Peytton every round. Just kept throwing darts and kept throwing big dives and couldn’t wilt under the pressure. She had to keep laying one brick after another, and she did that. And to know she had to have the dive of her life at the end to have any chance to win and to pull it out was pretty amazing. She was down eight-and-a-half points going into the last dive. So she knew she had to do something pretty special to win, and she certainly did it.”
She defeated Moore by a mere 0.20 margin. Both divers surpassed Becca Corbett’s 2012 state record of 509.30.
“I was like, if she hits it, good for her,” Reagan Patterson said of Moore’s final attempt. “Because she was under just as much pressure as I was. I would’ve been amazed if she had hit her dive and she beat me.”
Diving takes a tremendous amount of mental preparation. And, for Reagan, the biggest obstacle was staying relaxed.
“Last year I was super nervous going into it,” she said. “All last year at state. And I didn’t know how to work through it because I’d never felt that much nerves going into a meet. Because I put so much pressure on myself. So this meet, I told myself I’m just gonna try to stay as relaxed as I can and see how much better I can do, not putting that much pressure on myself. Each dive, if I hit it, or if I didn’t, I would stay relaxed and focus on the next dive. And I did that this year, and I didn’t really miss a dive, and it paid off.”
Reagan also had the support of her club coach, Julia “Jules” Vincent. Vincent, an Olympic diver for South Africa and former collegiate diver with South Carolina, is the head club coach at Kentucky Diving Club.
Because Vincent is also a volunteer assistant diving coach for UK, she couldn’t physically watch the meet due to NCAA regulations. But that doesn’t mean she wasn’t plugged in to every moment, texting Reagan, getting videos from the Patterson family and checking the live results online.
“There was one moment when I had to calm her down a little bit and be like, ‘it’s not over until you do your last dive,’” Vincent said. “I didn’t know what she was going to do. Because, to be honest, the day before, that last dive wasn’t looking super great in practice. I was just hoping that she was able to keep her calm. I’d seen her do it really well, so I knew she could. I just didn’t know what she was going to do. And that was definitely one of the more emotional moments of my coaching career with her.”
The victory was a culmination of years of hard work and sacrifice.
Like many during COVID, Reagan’s day-to-day was made drastically different by the pandemic. As a student-athlete, major adjustments had to be made in order for Patterson to maintain her skill and training. And when the Kentucky Diving Club was shut down due to COVID, she was more than willing to put in the work at a new facility.
“She had to travel to Knoxville five days a week,” Jud Patterson said. “So she’d get out of school, get in the car, we’d drive to Knoxville, she’d practice for two hours and then she’d get home about 10 o’clock. And she did that every day, five days a week for about nine months. So, when you think about that kind of sacrifice and that kind of effort, and then you see it come to fruition, it’s hard to even describe the satisfaction of that range, both as dad and as coach. And, for her, certainly.”
