Moultrie is situated in the heart of high school football country.

It is approximately an hour north of Valdosta, another town in South Georgia so football-mad that ESPN deemed it “Title Town USA” in 2008. But the 15,000 residents of Moultrie have become accustomed to seeing high school athletes bring home trophies for a different sport.

“In Moultrie you either dive or you play football,” Georgia freshman diver Ann-Perry Blank said.

Blank, her older brother Owen and senior Hannah Moore all dive for Coach Dan Laak in the Ramsey Center’s Gabrielsen Natatorium.

Senior Hannah Moore, a former Diving Tiger, grew up training at one of the finest outdoor diving facilities in the country. Photo courtesy Georgia Sports Communications

But just a few years earlier, the three dove as members of the prestigious, if remote, Moss Farms Diving Tigers in Moultrie.

Since the club began in the 1960s, members of the Diving Tigers have won 26 junior national championships and 39 Georgia high school state championships.

The two Blanks and Moore continued this tradition of excellence, but only after years of practice. All three divers started their training at Moss Farms before their eighth birthdays.

“There’s not a whole lot to do in Moultrie,” said Owen, now a junior at Georgia. “I started off at a pretty early age and I actually got kinda good at it, so I kept going.”

The success of the Diving Tigers made Moss Farms attractive to Moore and the Blanks at an early age.

“They would always take the older kids … and throw them out to the elementary schools and bring all their medals,” Owen said. “You see all the medals and think, ‘Yeah, I wanna be associated with that.’”

As the time came for Moore, Owen and finally Ann-Perry to continue their diving in college, Georgia had become an attractive destination, notably for the relationship the three divers had already developed with Laak.

“Since I was younger, Dan would always come to our meets,” Moore said. “He’s been watching us dive for years.”

Once the three divers started to seriously consider diving for the Bulldogs, the traditional ties between Athens and Moultrie created a comfortable atmosphere at Georgia.

“I came to visit Owen [at Georgia] one time, and it only took one time, and I knew I wanted to come here,” Ann-Perry said.

“I tried to get her to go to Florida,” Owen said laughing.

Pool of Dreams

But the story of Moss Farms began long before Moore and the Blanks.

Its namesake was Robert “Moose” Moss, a local farmer who was one of about 100 Americans serving as volunteer pilots  in China opposing Japanese aggression before the United States officially entered World War II.

Because of their significant success and the accolades they earned from the Chinese populace, the Americans earned the nickname “Flying Tigers.”

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Moss became a pilot for the U.S. Armed Forces proper.

“That’s the kind of person he was, a real Type A personality” said Dan Goodman, the current head coach at Moss Farms. “He was a character.”

Moss returned to Moultrie after the war and started coaching divers in a pool on his farm, calling them the Diving Tigers.

“I think a little bit of it is like Field of Dreams,” Goodman said. “He came back very loved. He wanted to be a diving coach, and coached kids for free, actually, which I think allowed him to have a lot of sway over how the kids trained.”

Both Goodman and Laak count the Diving Tigers as among the top ten diving programs in the country.

But the Moose Moss Aquatic Center in Moultrie, built in 1993, truly sets the Tigers apart from other diving clubs.

“It became one of the best, if not the best, outdoor facilities in the country,” Laak said.

“Any time I’ve been looking for a better facility to work at, this is by far the best one I’ve ever been to,” Goodman added.

With five diving platforms, Moss Farms’ diving well is comparable to that of Ramsey’s. Its dry land facility, however, is so valuable to the Diving Tigers that Owen spent a large part of his summer training in Moultrie.

Particularly of note is a diving board with a foam pit for landing that helps divers practice their in-air routines, without having to worry about the landing.

“One reason that I wanted to train at home this past summer was because of the pit,” he said. “You try a lot of big dives into there before you take anything up.”

In the 1960s few would have imagined that a premiere diving club would put Moultrie on the map. But the community that rallied around Robert Moss’ vision has continued to fulfill his dream into the 21st century.

“It’s real exciting to see a small town like that get behind an athletic program or any kind of program and support it and help it grow to one of the best in the country in whatever it is,” Laak said. “After all these years, they still support it.”