YES, NOAM!

Noam Kulbak’s diving career started with a backward fall into a pool. His father, Shlomo Kulbak, had encouraged Noam—a grade-school student at the time—to take the Nestea Plunge.

Go ahead, son, don’t just get your feet wet. Drench your entire frame.

“I was terrified,” Noam Kulbak recalls. Shortly thereafter, at the age of 10 at a diving class held at Northwestern University, Kulbak fell again.

In love, this time.

“Everything about the sport of diving excited me,” says Kulbak, now a Highland Park High School senior. “And I was fearless.”

At the Illinois High School Association (IHSA) Boys’ Swimming and Diving State Meet at the FMC Natatorium in Westmont on April 24, Kulbak was matchless. The 5-foot-10, 155-pounder won the state diving title—only the second Giant to do so in program history— with a score of 531.3 points, well ahead of the runner-up’s 508.85-point total.

The only other HPHS male diver to capture a state championship was John Robbins in 1959, when Soviet Union Premier Nikita Khrushchev visited the White House and the Los Angeles Dodgers defeated Chicago’s Go- Go White Sox in the World Series.

Bound for Penn State University, where he’ll continue his diving career under Nittany Lions coach Jeff DiNicola and likely major in mechanical engineering, Kulbak owns the Giants’ six- and 11-dive programs records with scores of 387.4 points and 601.3 points.

Kulbak finished fifth at the state meet as a sophomore and second in Illinois in 2023. HPHS’s 2022-2023 squad placed fourth at the state meet, missing a team trophy by one spot. Kulbak performed his crowd-pleasing, trickiest dive—front one-and-a-half with three twists (3.1 degree of difficulty)—for his 10th dive at his final state meet. The plunge requires strength, flexibility, oodles of talent and the uncanny air awareness Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell displayed in Top Gun movies.

“I love the pressure and the intensity of big moments at big meets,” Kulbak says. “I’m good at focusing, at dialing in, and I meditate between dives, which helps me a lot. At the state meets, I considered the silence of the crowd before my dives much ‘louder’ than the cheers. I remember being able to feel the crowd’s heavy presence every time I stood on a board as I prepared to dive.”

He was a promising gymnast, excelling on the still rings, before the start of his journey to Chairman of the Boards status. He started tumbling atop mats and attacking apparatuses in gyms at the age of 5, when he lived in Wilmette. But the heart condition Bicuspid Aortic Valve disease (Arnold Schwarzenegger also has the congenital heart defect) forced Kulbak to hang up his singlet and rings grips.

Kulbak’s mother, Marci, accepted a teaching position at Edgewood Middle School in Highland Park when Noam was 8. The family then moved to Highland Park.

He first ramped up his diving abilities at the Chicago Diving Club under the guidance of Alik Sarkisian, who has since moved to Florida. Sarkisian transformed Kulbak from novice to no-doubt-about-it prodigy in about three years. “Alik,” Kulbak says, “was intense, with amazing diving knowledge. He was big on repetition, repetition, repetition. He’s the kind of coach you see portrayed in sports movies.”

Kulbak’s other significant youth coaches: Patrick Schulze, Jonathan Roby, and Walter Schroeder. Schulze coached at Chicago Diving before joining the staff at Northbrook-based Glenbrook Aquatics, where Kulbak has trained since 2019. Roby, a twotime state runner-up (2009, 2010) at Glenbrook North High School, was Kulbak’s HPHS coach and received Illinois High School Boys’ Diving Coach of the Year honors in March for the 2023-2024 season. And Kulbak travels weekly to Milwaukee to work primarily on his 10-meter platform diving (a college event) with Schroeder.

“Patrick got me through mental slips,” says Kulbak, who placed 26th at nationals (platform) in the 16-18 agegroup division. “I faced my first mental block in the sixth grade, while working on a gainer (a daring reverse-rotation dive). I first met Jon when I was in the eighth grade. The more I practiced diving in high school, the more I appreciated the escape and sense of freedom it provided.”

Kulbak plunged his way to instant success at the prep level, supplanting the Giants’ varsity 11-dive mark of 450 points with a 475-point effort in his freshman season. He then kept topping his program record season after season, sometimes meet after meet. His six-dive record of 387.4 points obliterated the program’s previous high in the category by more than 123 points. You want more eye-popping numbers? Here you go: Kulbak once earned a colossal 72.85 points on a dive at a dual meet, thanks to a ‘10’ (on a scale of 1 to 10) from a judge.

“There’s not a better feeling in diving than when you nail a tough dive, but I did not deserve that high of a score from that judge,” says Kulbak, owner of a lofty 4.6 GPA.

He certainly merited state gold more than two months ago. Kulbak’s victorious 586.75-point total at the IHSA Libertyville Sectional on February 17 ranked second among state diving qualifiers to Lincoln-Way East High School sophomore Nate Jackson’s 612.05-point showing at the Lincoln-Way Central Sectional on the same date.

Jackson wound up in fifth place (481.3) at state. Kulbak wound up wowing hundreds.

“I did not sleep well the week of the state meet,” Kulbak says. “I got maybe 10 hours of sleep, combined, the two nights before the preliminaries and the night before the finals session. I remember the ride home after state with my siblings (brother Ori, 26, of Chicago; and sister Dani, 29, of Portland, Oregon) and thinking, ‘What do I do now?’ I felt kind of lonely.”

And tired enough to sleep for 14 hours straight, until 2 p.m. the next day.

Count on Kulbak to be wide awake and ready for whatever awaits him in College Station at Penn State, inside the classroom and off the boards. The young man is thinking about becoming an architect, after setting unofficial records at home in the construction of Lincoln Logs and Jenga structures.

“I love building things,” Kulbak says.

His diving career is sturdier than ever.

“I can’t wait to be a diver at a Big Ten school,” Kulbak says. “I know it will be challenging and require hard work. I won’t win the NCAA title next year, but I plan to do all I can to be a competitive college diver.”