Mercury All-Area: Perkiomen Valley’s Gabby Filzen returns from training in Indiana to win state silver diving medal

Perkiomen Valley senior Gabby Filzen attempts some of the hardest dives of anyone in the country.

A giant leap of faith she took about two years ago played a big role in why she is able to do so.

Filzen left home for the RipFest Diving Club in Arcadia, Ind. in the Fall of 2020 and didn’t return home to Schwenksville for about nine months as she attended online school and trained seven hours a day.

After a season away from high school diving, the PV senior came back to finish her Vikings’ career with a state silver medal and be named the 2021-22 Mercury All-Area Girls Swimmer/Diver of the Year.

“It’s a crazy environment,” Filzen said of RipFest. “Last year, my teammate was Tyler Downs. And he’s an Olympian. That’s crazy to be like that’s my friend and he’s going to the Olympics. It’s definitely iron sharpens iron. We all push each other. It’s very positive here, and I think that’s why I love it so much.”

There was nowhere for Filzen to dive when COVID shut down the country in the spring of 2020. She went to camp at RipFest that summer and decided to stay.

Mercury All-Area: Girls Swimming Teams

It took some convincing of her mother, Tracey, but Filzen knew if she wanted to be her best it was a chance she had to take.

“There was no diving open in Pennsylvania,” Filzen said. “Everything was shut down. I was like, ‘Mom this is my only option. This is what I need to do.’ It took like a week to get my mom in on it, but I got it and I’m so happy to be here.”

The decision showed she was ready to go all in on the sport.

“Obviously it’s a high level of passion and a high level of maturity,” said RipFest CEO and head coach John Wingfield, who coached the Team USA Diving team in 2008 and 2020. “A lot of teenagers can’t look past next week and she’s looking forward to the future. It’s really an adult move and adult concept and she’s really been able to capture that.”

Diving wasn’t Filzen’s first passion. She started out as a gymnast but said she reached her peak around age 13 and stopped seeing the improvement she was striving for.

It took a little time but she soon found a new sport where her unique athleticism and aerial awareness were a perfect fit.

“I started with gymnastics and once I quit, I sat on the couch and my mom was like, ‘You have to do something.’ I didn’t know what to do,” Filzen said. “I did not want to start diving at all. I hated it. I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ Then I did a couple practices and I just fell in love I guess.”

Filzen won the Pioneer Athletic Conference diving championship as a freshman and again as a sophomore. She finished seventh in District 1 and 18th in the state in 2020.

With uncertainty surrounding the high school diving season amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Filzen stayed at RipFest to train last winter and missed her junior year competing for PV.

“I really did miss high school diving,” Filzen said. “High school diving is such a close environment, especially since I come from this big team and it’s such a small team at PV. I really like coming home and having that close environment with my coach and four other teammates and just having that little circle of us.”

Despite continuing to train in Indiana while taking online class, Filzen decided to come back and compete for the Vikings this winter knowing it would take some extra preparation. She wanted to compete.

“That’s an even higher level of work to prepare for the high school season because our season of competition is generally late April through August and the rest of the year is training,” Wingfield said. “We had to change the approach a little bit to what we were doing and get her ready in really a short period of time for the high school one-meter because most of her time is spent on the Olympic events, which is three-meter and platform.”

Filzen dominated competition at the Pioneer Athletic Conference championships, scoring a 463.65, well ahead of Upper Merion’s Ashley Evitts (390.95) in second place.

She put together a 448.96 at the District 1 meet, nailing her front, two and a half pike to highlight a gold-medal worthy performance that bested Conestoga’s Avery Hillier (444.25) and Grace Gallagher (438.40).

“It’s special to win my senior year and really go out with a bang at districts,” told The Mercury after the event.

Filzen sprained three of her fingers in preparation for the state championship meet while practicing the reverse 2-1/2 on 1-meter dive she hoped to attempt.

After a nervous couple of days and unable to perform the dive she originally hoped, Filzen stuck to her consistent approach and scored 424.15 points to finish second behind only North Allegheny’s Christina Shi with 428.45.

“That ended pretty well,” Filzen said. “I was pretty happy about that.”

Along with the physical impact of her training regiment, Filzen said this season she felt a mental edge on the board she hadn’t felt before, which helped carry her to a state silver medal.

“I think my mentality going into meets has really improved,” Filzen said. “I get up there and even if I’m not confident I can pretend that I’m confident and I can look not as scared. And I’ve really improved my overall performance and being able to handle my nerves. It’s a big thing for me because I used to be so bad at competing. I’ve gotten so much better.”

“I think part of the reason is I’ve come here (Indiana) and I’ve been able to do my dives, 12 of each or however many I want until I’m fully confident in my dives. I’ve gotten experience so I can be more confident when I’m on the board, and I know my dives. I know I can hit it. I just block the crowd away and pretend I’m at practice.”

The day after states, Filzen traveled back to Indiana to prepare for the USA Diving circuit this summer. She will put her collegiate plans on hold as she takes a gap year in 2022-23 to train at RipFest.

Filzen will certainly have her fair share of college choices when the time comes, but she has other goals in mind in the meantime.

“I just really want to do well,” Filzen said. “I don’t know I have these big dives that are coming up for me, and I’m excited to do them. I want to be the best I can be.”

Wingfield said the dives Filzen does on the 3-meter springboard put her in elite company amongst the top divers in the country. Some of her dives on the platform other divers don’t attempt or have only been accomplished in competition on rare occasions.

The future is bright for Filzen and she is ready to leap at any opportunity she can to reach he fullest potential.

“From an athleticism standpoint, there’s not many like her in our sport,” Wingfield said. “She has incredible power, great flexibility, great aerial awareness and really the upside to what she’s going to be able to accomplish is going to be really amazing. It’s going to be really amazing what she does in the next two years as we prepare for Olympic trials and things like that. That’s the ultimate goal is to get her to Olympic Trials and then once you’re at the trials you never know what might happen.”