Greg Hansen: Teen Tucson diver Delaney Schnell hitting the heights

What does she do, I ask?

"She's a diver."

I hedge a bit. The Olympics ended a month ago and, in my mind, so did the diving season.

"She's really good, she's from Tucson and some day she could be in the Olympics," the caller insists. "You are missing a very good story."

I do not want to miss a very good story so a few weeks later I'm at the Hillenbrand Aquatic Center, looking up. Way, way up. Delaney Schnell, who turns 14 in December, climbs the stairwell - sometimes she does this 40 times a day - until she reaches the 10-meter platform.

Someone driving north on Campbell Avenue honks, then yells, acknowledging Delaney's presence. "They do that all the time," she says. "When people find out what I do, they say, 'That's insane; how do you do it?'"

Do you know how high 10 meters is? It's 32 feet, 8 inches. Standing next to the diving well at Hillenbrand, it looks like 320 feet.

On a good day, on tiptoes, Delaney Schnell is 5 feet tall. She looks so vulnerable on that faraway tower. I am tempted to shout "are you sure you need to do this?"

And then she releases herself, a spinning, tumbling speck against the afternoon sky.

"My most difficult dive is probably a back twister, where I flip twice with a 1 1/2 twist," she says. "I've learned some of the harder dives, those the Olympians do. Mentally, they are really scary because you're going off such a high platform, but you just have to let yourself go."

I look around to see if anyone else saw what I just saw, but aside from 10 of Delaney's teammates on the Tucson Diving Team, and her coach, ex-UA diver Ali Scaife, there are no witnesses.

Holy smokes, I say to myself. This is a really good story.

On Thursday, Delaney, an eighth grader at Carson Middle School, will accompany the USA Diving delegation to Adelaide, Australia, for the FINA World Junior Diving Championships. This is no weekend meet. She won't return until Oct. 14 (it's OK, she'll have a tutor, proper chaperones and a two-week schedule of homework), and by then the clock for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics will be ticking.

It's rushing it to say that Delaney will be a top contender for the 2016 Olympics - "Only have two platform divers make the Olympics from the American team," she says - but she is a 2011 American junior national champion and, as such, is firmly on the map.

"Delaney's progress has been straight up," said Scaife. "She hasn't plateaued. She just keeps going up. You have to remember that she's 13, she still likes to have fun out here at practice, but she doesn't leave without doing something special."

Delaney has a lot in common with America's 10-meter platform divers at the London Olympics, Brittany Viola and Katie Bell. Both were elite-level gymnasts who began diving when they were 13.

Delaney started as a gymnast when she was four, reached level 8 (let's just say that's about as good as you can hope to be when you're 10) and, her mom, Cindy, a Tucson special-education teacher, says, "She was good - she had been in the Bela Karolyi Camp - but she was also burning out after six years."

After gymnastics, Delaney initially swam at the Ford Aquatics program but was intrigued by the divers.

"I was like, 'Oh my gosh, they're amazing.' I thought it was scary. When I got up to the 10-meter platform I'd think, 'How do people dive off this?' "

Two years later, in Medellin, Colombia, Delaney finished second at the 2011 FINA World Junior Championships. Talk about a quick study.

Delaney gets her athletic drive from her mom and her dad, Robert Schnell, also a teacher. Both are passionate runners. Cindy usually runs, or goes to a yoga class, while Delaney is in one of her five-times-a-week practice sessions that can run two or three hours.

"Delaney's a perfectionist; she's so competitive, sometimes it's hard to live with her," Cindy says, laughing. "She knew two years ago the World Championships were going to be held in Australia and she made up her mind to make the team. She knew only three girls would make it, but just motivated her more."

At the Olympic Training Center in Colorado, where Delaney has trained, USA Diving's under-the-logo catchphrase is "Guts, Grace, Glory."

Here's one they left out: Go for it.

At 13, Delaney Schnell has gone from gymnast to swimmer to beginning diver to world-class diver in three years. In Australia, she'll be competing against older girls, 14-15. If that's not going for it, what is?