Freshman Abbey Bernardo holds her hands in the air and prepares to jump off the diving board. But the only water nearby is a few cases of Dasani in a refrigerator against the wall.

It’s 7:15 on Monday morning at Memorial Stadium. Inside the west concourse between Gates 18 and 20, a diving board springs as Bernardo jumps off it, a coach yells at his athletes and a radio plays David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.”

The diving team is the smallest varsity team at Illinois-two athletes, Bernardo and sophomore Jackie Bain, and coach Billy McGowan.

“I think a lot of people think diving’s easy, and it’s not,” Bain said. “It’s not as physically demanding as other sports, but you need to be in really good shape to do things. And you need to smack and get right back up and do it again, so you need a lot of pain tolerance.”

Although the team usually practices and competes alongside the swim team, diving is a far cry from doing laps.

“Just like gymnastics and wrestling share a mat, we share a pool, and that’s where the similarities end,” said McGowan. “They’ll do stretching and some of the things they do in weight training are the same, but other than that we’re completely different.”

The divers practice in the stadium three mornings a week, in addition to daily afternoon workouts at the pool. Although they are on the deck throughout the afternoon sessions, 75 percent of the current workout program does not involve water.

“Most of the dryland they do here is diving-related,” McGowan said. “They’re conditioning their abs but they’re also doing something that they actually do on the diving board.”

It is the end of the first phase of the three-part training regime McGowan has developed for his athletes. He has worked Bain and Bernardo to a point of physical exhaustion in this early portion of the season, with the intent of slowly improving their technique now that their strength and stamina are at the level he wants.

“We do a lot of fundamentals, foundation work, conditioning – breaking them down, breaking them into a million pieces,” McGowan said. “Then in phase two, which starts the day after we get back from Thanksgiving, we start putting the pieces back together, rebuilding them.”

The second phase is half dryland and half diving. After Christmas, as the Big Ten meet approaches, the divers spend 75 percent of practice diving and only 25 percent conditioning as they perfect their technique.

Though it started the year with five athletes, the team has dwindled to include only two. While Illinois’ squad is abnormally small – most dive teams include four to six athletes – McGowan said Bernardo and Bain prefer to have two committed athletes, rather than a larger group, which might not be as dedicated.

“If we had six girls like Jackie and Abbey, we’d be the best team in the Big Ten,” McGowan said. “But it’s hard to get top divers.”

McGowan is in his second season at Illinois and is the program’s first full-time coach in at least 12 years. He said that because a graduate student always filled the position in the past, the program had a reputation for being one of the weakest in the conference.

“This year and last year, I’ve been trying to change that image, putting money into the program, recruiting, bringing in divers like Abbey,” McGowan said. “I’m constantly trying to build a program and bring these people in.”

But finding athletes who want to be at the stadium at 6 a.m. – rather than across Peabody Drive at the Six Pack sleeping – has been a challenge. McGowan said most athletes are not prepared for the transition from high school and club diving to the NCAA.

“It’s a big time commitment,” Bain said. “A lot of kids come and they don’t fully understand that, I know I didn’t fully understand it, and if you want to come and be a regular college student, you really can’t.

“It’s a lot of sacrifices, and if you’re not going to put the time into it then you’re not going to see the results.”