The Calvert Hall College High School diving team in Towson is plunging no more. The three-meter board used by generations of students has been declared unsafe.

The school was renovating its pool, and bringing the existing board up to current code would have required dredging the pool bottom two feet deeper, to 12-plus feet.

“They didn’t want to continue the diving program if it wasn’t up to regulation,” explains Doug Heidrick, Calvert Hall’s director of communications. “It’s a controversial decision.”

Across Maryland and around the nation, the diving board, long a source of bouncy summer fun, is becoming an endangered species, a victim of more inhospitable pools, revised safety rules, litigation fears and insurance costs. The higher the board, the lower its odds of survival.

“The real trend is to build shallow pools: that's 5 feet or less,” notes Pamela Engle, who helps oversee pool construction and compliance for the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

That means the future belongs to neck-deep lap pools, super puddles that preclude diving of any kind, even the lowly belly flop.

Already, three-meter boards are fast disappearing. Engle says state inspectors don’t encounter the high boards very often.

There was a time when big-bounce swan dives, jack knives and cannonballs off the high board were common thrills. Literally and figuratively they represented many youngsters’ first tentative, confidence-building leaps of faith. (“Hey, Mom! Dad! Watch this!”)

Remember? The gritty feel of the board underfoot, like taking a short walk on sandpaper. Liftoff, followed by a nervous squeal or triumphant yawp. World swirling. Heart pumping. Then splashdown, and entry into that cool, aqua-blue womb of water.

“Those days are gone,” declares Brian Loeffler, head swimming and diving coach at Loyola College.

Loeffler can tell diving boards are on the wane by the dearth of talent coming into the collegiate ranks today. His conference-championship meet has as many as 70 competitors in swimming events. For diving, it's roughly 20 women and half that many men.

“There is not as many opportunities for youths to learn diving,” he says.

Naval Academy diving coach Joe Suriano believes diving has gotten “a bad rap,” pointing out “most of the time alcohol is involved” when serious accidents occur. Beth Drude, president of the Central Maryland Diving League, contends that the “largest problem is dispelling the myth that diving is unsafe.”

How did that negative perception take hold? In retrospect, it looks like the domino theory of risk management: a high-profile liability case caused insurance-premium spikes, which triggered revised safety standards and deeper-pool designs, which led to higher construction costs and prohibitively expensive upgrades, which begot a quick-fix solution: ditch the diving board.

The ban-the-board momentum gained strength after a 1993 court case in Washington state.

Teenager Shawn Meneely became paralyzed from the neck down after doing a head-first dive in a neighbor's pool. His family sued the pool builder, diving board manufacturer and the National Spa & Pool Institute, an Alexandria, Va., trade association then promoting safety standards that the builder had ignored.

A jury awarded Meneely some $10 million in compensatory damages.

The National Spa & Pool Institute wound up filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, later to be reborn as The Association of Pool and Spa Professionals.

“On point of law and common sense, there’s no reason to find us guilty,” says association spokeswoman Suzanne Barrrows. “Trade associations that promulgate standards in the way we do are very aware of Meneely.”

That kind of big-money, high-impact lawsuit gets lots of people’s attention. As liability rates increased, so did regulatory oversight. Florida is regarded as the most proactive state. Contractors there, says Barrows, need a special pool construction license; owners must get a special pool-building permit.

Texas is making news because of a crackdown on nonresidential diving boards conducted by the Department of State Health Services. In the past, pools built before 1999 had been given a regulatory waiver.

According to DHMH’s Patricia Engle, the key Maryland safety rule requires that the pool diving well be at least 9 feet deep for boards under 20 inches high. For one-meter boards, 10 feet deep. For three-meter boards, 12 1/2 feet deep.

The high dive at Padonia Park Club in Cockeysville was an early revised-risk casualty. About 20 years ago owner Fred Rigger wanted to replace his three-meter board, which dated to when the pool opened in 1962. He had second thoughts after his insurance company informed him the annual insurance premium was jumping to more than $10,000.

Rigger removed the high dive, but for sentimental sake has kept the support stanchion in place, now decorated with artificial palm fronds.

“When my operations guy and I took it down, we were just irate,” recalls Rigger, who regards his faux tree as “a sad symbol” of caution run amuck.

Conspicuously absent in the diving-board safety debate is any mention of specific, verifiable injury data. Fred Rigger laments “these mythological statistics” that supposedly show diving boards pose an abnormal threat.

He has an ally in Greg Munro, a professor at the University of Montana School of Law and an avid recreational diver. “What I’m interested in is the disappearance of municipal and college diving boards,” says Munro. “The thing that's peculiar is we’re still insuring rodeos and wrestling and football.”

Out of curiosity Munro examined 50 years of appellate court decisions and found, on average, just one case a year involving a “serious” diving accident.

Research studies commissioned in the 1970s and 1980s by the National Spa & Pool Institute, the trade association later involved in the Meneely suit, concluded 75 percent of diving accidents take place in lakes and other natural bodies of water, not pools (a statistic the North American Spine Society cites in its literature). Those studies also concluded 95 percent of pool injuries are sustained in shallow water, nowhere near a diving board.

A study compiled in 2003 by S. R. Smith, an Oregon company that claims to be the largest maker of diving boards and pool deck equipment, estimated 169 spinal cord injuries a year result from dives taken in pools. However, just 10 percent of those involve a diving board.

“For some reason, there’s a presumption that if somebody’s hurt diving into a pool, it’s from a diving board,” says Tom Masterson, general counsel for S. R. Smith. “I think there's an unfortunate word association.”

Why, then, has the tide turned so strongly against diving boards? Munro says it’s an overreaction born of misconstrued data and one mega lawsuit.

Also, “There's no lobby for the boards. Adults don’t dive.”

Pool managers and pool users in Maryland must read the risk-versus-reward currents as best they can. Some stand firm. Some surrender and dismantle their boards.

Meadowbrook Aquatic Center dumped its high dive about 20 years ago under insurance premium pressure. Bob Klem, vice president of the board of directors at Whitehall Pool and Tennis Club in Bowie, says his club pays about $5,000 annually to keep their high dive open. But they also implemented major safety precautions: extending the handrails on the board and putting padding around the lip of the pool underneath.

“I believe it is kind of a rite of passage,” says Klem. “We have kids as little as six or seven going off the high dive.”

Forest Knolls Pool in Silver Spring is one of the few community pools in Montgomery County still clinging to its high dive, in continuous use since 1962.

“We’ve always been told we're kind of grandfathered in,” says board member Nanci Schaefer. “We’ve had no accidents. It’s the same premium with or without the board.”

Once every summer Schaefer, 57, climbs up the high dive and jumps. Just to prove she can do it: “I challenge myself.”

Ramsey Bigham Mihavetz, coach of the Bolton Hill Swim and Tennis Club swim team, remembers screwing up the courage to tackle the Bolton Hill high dive at about age six.

She also remembers that “milestone moment” when she attempted her first 360-degree dive - then got weak-kneed standing on the board and fell splat onto the concrete below, miraculously landing unharmed.

Her sons, ages 2 and 5, won't ever stand atop that lofty perch. Bolton Hill's diving board was dismantled long ago.

“I’m a mother now, so there's part of me that’s glad something hazardous isn't around for kids,” admits Mihavetz. “But they're missing something. There’s a line somewhere, and I don’t know where it is.”