When I was a kid (in the 1970s) every swimming pool - even public pools - had a “high dive” and a “low dive.” I’m not sure how high the hive dives were, but I would estimate 10 feet. Had lots of fun diving off of them. 
The high dives seem to have disappeared from the pools around here. Why?
I bemoaned the passing of diving boards last year. Lawsuits and high insurance rates have killed them off, I’m afraid.
When I drive cross-country, I’m always on the lookout for public swimming pools that still have diving boards. One of my favorites was Riverside Park in Miles City, Montana.
Yeah, as blondebear said, even the low dives are pretty much a thing of the past. Only a high school or other educational establishment (or YMCA et al.) has them anymore.
Did anyone ever personally know anyone who got hurt jumping off one-high or low or whatever?
Uhh, I’m not sure that they’re all gone. The local pool at my town has two diving boards, for instance. One is about 6 or 7 feet above the water, the other is maybe 2 feet above.
When I was coming up the local pool had a high dive that was (I’d estimate) approximately 500 ft above the water. It took about 45 minutes to climb the ladder, and the board itself was thin as a reed, and slippery, and trembled like a 12 year old girl in a hurricane.
Plus, if you hit the water wrong, it’d kill you.
I hope they haven’t taken the high dives away.
Regulation competition diving boards are either 1 meter or 3 meters above the water surface.
Regulation fixed diving platforms are 5, 7.5, or 10 meters above the surface.
Our local rec centers still have boards, but I agree they’re seem to be getting less common.
Yes, a bunch of people although none with lasting consequences other than scars. It usually happens when boys try to do a trick outside of their ability level and end up smacking their head or upper body on the board resulting in body or head trauma. Even competitive divers have done this evn though their dives were higher but that doesn’t matter for that type of injury.
Still, growing up, we had a place called Crystal Lake just over in East Texas. They had an amazing assortment of dangerous equipment but the best was the trolley tower. The trolley tower was an actual tower with wooden stairs with 3 levels. The lowest was about 30 feet high and the highest must have been about 60. You took the stairs to whatever level your bravery would allow and then you walked out on this big, wet, wooden platform. You grabbed a wet rope and pulled and pulled the trolley up so that you could ride it down over the lake. This was the biggest example of this type of idea I have ever seen in common useage. The problem was that the tower platforms we just over the muddy bank of the lake and people did fall and die or get maimed occasionally. However, if you weren’t one of those. You got to take a screaming ride from the tower way out into the lake. You could also plunge off in the middle if you wanted even though it was frowned upon to drop high into the lake a good speed.
I shed a tear for kids today and their sad little padded world.
You must have gone to high school in Acapulco?
No, I remember exactly the boards he’s talking about. The higest paltform at the Aquatic’s Center near my place was easily one bazillion feet high and it would take a really long time to climb the ladder, even with all the guys below going “Hurry up, chicken.”
Strangely, as an adult , it looks a lot lower. But I swear, the thing must’ve been a mile high when I was eleven. They must have lowered it.
When I was 10, I was the only kid on the planet that climbed all the way to the top of the high dive, walked out to the end, turned around and climbed all the way back down. I still have nightmares.
Who wants to spend the money on liability insurance nowadays?
Our association not only removed the diving board, they erected signs saying “No Diving”
UK: The only swimming pools with them in that I know of are pretty old (built in the 70’s). The pool in Wigan has a set of boards similar to what LinusK describes. There were three levels, the top one looked to be about a billion feet above the water.
A billion feet?
That’s not diving, its re-entry…
grin
FML
I have a cousin who jumped off a diving board and hit the pavement instead of the water. His arm was so badly broken that nobody bothered to cross-question him about which edge of the board he’d jumped from.
Most of the swimming pools in my city used to have 1m springboards, and a few had a 3m. I think most of them have been removed, not (AFAIK) for general liability reasons but because the deep ends of those pools weren’t quite deep enough for today’s safety standards which require a certain depth to have a diving board.
There’s still a few city-run facilities with 1m diving boards, and even a couple with proper diving towers.
The pool that was one block away from the house I grew up in had a 1m springboard. I knew two people who were hurt on it. One slipped a little on the end and “skidded” off and smacked his head. The other one was when my instructor at a swimming lesson dove off the board and hit his head on the bottom of the pool, scraping the skin on his nose/forehead pretty bad.
They removed the board a few years later, and now there a 1m tall solid “platform” all along the deep end of the pool. You can stand on the platform and dive in. I guess it’s not as dangerous as the old springboards.
On the other hand, my city’s pools now have many cool features for kids that they didn’t have when I was growing up. Quite a few have climbing ropes, and some have huge inflatable mattresses in the deep end that you get onto via swinging on from the climbing rope. A few pools have some “monkey bars”-type contraptions suspended over the pool. And a few have a “climbing wall” that’s about five or six meters high that overhangs the deep end, so when you fall/jump off, you land in the water.
I was never injured, but once I slipped when climbing up to the 3-meter board. I landed on top of the guy who was behind me on the ladder. Very embarrassing, of course, but there weren’t any serious injuries, thank Og.
They’ve been illegal in CA for a long time. They were common when I was a kid, but I haven’t seen one for at least 10 years.
Coming up?
WhereTF did you [grow] up that had a board that high? Or are you describing it from a kids observation and memory?
The last time we visited my sister-in-law when she still lived in Kansas (summer 1999) we went to a public swimming pool that had a board that was marked 22 feet above the water, which I believe is more than double most regular boards. Being used to much lower boards I thought it was a hell of a drop. It was somewhere in the Olethe or Overland Park area, I don’t recall exactly where.
Hell, when I was in high school, we used to move the lever, or knob, or whatever it was, that adjusted how “springy” the diving board was, and none of the pool staff ever said a word.
(Of course, I SUCK at diving, and I always have, so I usually just jumped off. Shut up).
:o 
Here you can see a photo of the diving facilities at a relatively new indoor pool complex in Trondheim, Norway. (It opened in 2001.) It has diving boards or platforms at 1, 3, 5, 7.5 and 10 meters. We’ve been promised a new pool with a similar platform here in Bærum, to be completed sometime before pigs begin flying. For that matter, Frognerbadet in Oslo proper has a diving pool with high dive, and there are several diving structures that go up to at least 5 meters sticking out of the water on popular beaches in and around the city. I imagine you’ll find even more of these in parts of Europe where the swimming season is a bit longer. Clearly you high-dive enthusiasts need to take a nice long vacation abroad 