‘Big dreams mean big work’
Catherine Ermis is seen in a pike position mid-dive at the AAU National Championships in Orlando in May 2023. (Photos Provided by Elizabeth Ermis)GREENSBORO — In a few short weeks, students in the Diocese of Charlotte will be out of the pool and back in school. But for Catherine Ermis, a rising fourth-grader at Our Lady of Grace Catholic School in Greensboro, days in the pool have only just begun.
The spirited 9-year-old is fresh off winning a gold medal in the 9 and under 3-meter springboard diving competition at the 2023 AAU National Championships in May – after just two years of training.
She is now considered among the best divers in the world for her age group.
“After winning, I felt really good. My hard work paid off!” Catherine says.
She trained before and after school for 25 to 30 hours a week leading up to the competition, working to perfect four different dives, including an inward one and a half somersault tuck, something she began working on after she qualified for the championships the month before the event.
“Big dreams mean big work,” Catherine says. “You have to do a lot of work to reach your dreams.”
After winning the gold medal, she earned a spot on the AAU national team and will compete with other young divers this fall in Ireland and Scotland.
The inevitable question about Olympic dreams comes up often. Catherine’s response? She’s focused on the national team and says the Olympics are a long time from now. She’d be aiming for the 2032 Games.
The past two years have been enough of a whirlwind for Catherine, her parents, and her five siblings. Countless hours of training, travel to national and international competitions, and appointments to keep, not to mention all the everyday joys and demands of family life.
Catherine’s mother, Elizabeth, says they wouldn’t have it any other way, noting how much her daughter loves the sport.
“I feel like I’m flying when I dive,” Catherine says.
Elizabeth says Catherine’s interest in diving began when she began heckling her older brother from the stands at his diving practice.
“She’s up there giving him a hard time about what he is or isn’t doing, and the coach said, ‘She’s mouthy. Do you think you can just come down here and show us all how to do it?’” Elizabeth recalls.
Full of spunk and confidence, Catherine accepted the challenge.
“She’s definitely the most fearless of all of my kids,” Elizabeth says. “So, anything that they would ask her to do, she was like, ‘Sure, I’ll do that.’”
At the end of a two-week diving trial, Catherine’s natural talent was evident. She began training in 2021 and participated in her first competition, the AAU National Championships in Texas, just a year later. She came in 12th out of 67 in her age group at the 2022 competition.
Then she was invited to compete at an international event in Argentina in November 2022.
By the time the qualifying event for the 2023 national championships in Orlando rolled around in the spring, Elizabeth began seeing more clearly God’s hand in Catherine’s diving career.
Wearing her gold medal on the winners’ podium at the event“We were already going to be in Florida visiting my parents. At that point, we didn’t really have solid plans to try to go to the nationals, but I said to her coach, ‘Look, this qualifier is happening. We’re already going to be there. Do you think it would be worthwhile to just go and see how she would do at another larger scale meet?’”
The coach agreed to give it a try, saying, “You never know what’s going to happen.”
“I don’t think any of us had any expectation that she would win both of the events at the qualifier and then go on to win the national meet,” Elizabeth adds.
Noting that neither she nor her husband Chris is athletic, Elizabeth says Catherine’s gift for diving is not genetic.
“I do really believe that her talent is God-given and that God brought her to diving,” she says.
Catherine adds that God helps her family in other ways too.
“We pray that I will be safe before practice and especially at meets,” she says. “It’s a lot of traveling, so we pray for safe travels.”
The Our Lady of Grace School community supports her through prayer as well, offering encouragement and cheer. When Catherine was preparing to compete in Argentina, the school’s Spanish teacher, Sheila Shearin, had the eighth-grade class create “buena suerte” posters for her.
Her third-grade teacher, Celia McMullen, and Principal Catherine Rusch have come to see her dive at practice, and Katie Houston, her first-grade teacher, who has since retired, sent Catherine a handwritten letter after seeing her success in the news.
“It feels really good to have my classmates and teachers support me,” Catherine says. “It helps me do better to know how proud they will be of me.”
— Annie Ferguson
More online
At www.catholicnewsherald: Watch the dives that earned Catherine Ermis the gold medal at the AAU National Championships in Orlando.
Problem-solving with robots, drones and 3D printers
CHARLOTTE — The top brass turned out at Our Lady of the Assumption School May 24 – and the students were ready.
It was time to cut the ribbon on a new $325,000 SmartLab filled with robots and drones, computers and iPads, 3D printers and a laser engraver.
These are learning tools educators could not have imagined a generation ago, part of a hands-on learning approach that teaches critical thinking, problem-solving and collaboration.
But before two eighth-graders could wield a giant pair of scissors to cut the red ribbon, the entire school – 180 students, pre-kindergarten through eighth grade – put on a show to welcome diocesan leaders May 24. Among them were Father Timothy Reid, vicar of education for Catholic Schools, and Dr. Greg Monroe, superintendent.
TV news turned out, too!
Standing at the lectern, in a gym adorned with multinational flags that illustrate the diversity of his students, Our Lady of Assumption Principal Tyler Kulp emceed the show.
“What types of things will we learn in the SmartLab?” he asked the students.
“Circuitry!” the pre-kindergartners called out.
“Robotics!” kindergartners shouted.
“Mechanics!” yelled the first-graders.
“Environmental technology…manufacturing technology…software engineering…media arts…recording data…control technology…scientific analysis,” students in each grade called out in turn.
Soon it was time to visit the main attraction.
The SmartLab is one of a handful across North Carolina, paid for through federal COVID-19 relief funds.
It’s a classroom with four “learning islands,” each equipped with three computers where two kids are assigned to work together on a project or problem. There are supplies of all kinds to help kids create. They’ll visit the SmartLab twice a week and follow a curriculum designed to take them through all the disciplines.
First-year teacher James Moore says in this classroom he will assist, not lecture. “My job,” he says, “is to direct and guide without giving them the answers. We want the kids to solve problems, to explore and figure it out on their own.”
At one learning island, pre-kindergartners Daniel and Cassidy used magic markers to draw lines thick enough for a golf ball-sized robot named “Ozobot” to follow on a sheet of paper. This was an intro to “coding.”
At another island, middle schoolers Anthony and Senai followed a computer model to build a bridge out of Lego-like composites.
Then there were eighth-graders John and Delila, who were working on a computer they said to “improve the design” of a flagpole holder their teacher produced on a 3D printer but didn’t work.
“This is very different learning than you do in a traditional class,” Leigh Robertson of SmartLab supplier Creative Learning Systems told students. “The problems you run into – it’s your job to solve those problems. It’s all on you. And you can do a lot of things you didn’t know you could do.”
Eighth-grader John Nguyen was inspired: “Man, I love this lab. There is so much to do and so much to experience. I want to be an engineer mainly because of this! I get to do this for a job!”
Even their principal couldn’t contain himself: “I can program this thing to follow me around the school,” Kulp said, holding a basketball-size robot on wheels.
Diocesan leaders congratulated the east Charlotte school for its example to others in the diocesan system of 20 schools.
“Catholic schools have always been on the forefront of cutting-edge educational teaching,” Monroe said.
“The more we learn about ourselves and our world, the closer we get to God.”
Father Reid, too, noted the kids’ great blessing and teased that they are “guinea pigs” trying out the SmartLab. “What a great blessing it is to have a SmartLab,” he told students. “It is your responsibility to take it very seriously and use it to the best of its potential and yours.”
— Liz Chandler. Photos by Troy Hull
