Hixon was born in Amherst, Massachusetts to Mandy and David Hixon. He has an elder brother Matthew. He studied at Amherst Regional High School. In 2013, he enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin, but moved after a year to Indiana University in Bloomington. Hixon's mother is a diving coach at the University of Massachusetts and started coaching Michael Hixon diving when he was aged seven. He started entering competitions two years later. He was also involved in other sports – basketball, football and lacrosse, but chose to concentrate on diving. He decided to forego football in the freshman year in high school, and although he also later made the varsity basketball team, scheduling conflicts meant that he had to abandon basketball.
Diving career
Junior championships
Hixon began diving at the national level when he was 12 and has won the 1-meter competition at the national championships three years running. Hixon is a six-time junior U.S. champion, and won two bronze medals, in the 1 meter and 3 meter events, at the 2009 Junior Pan-American Diving Championships in Calgary. He subsequently paired with Kristian Ipsen to win a silver at the 2010 FINAWorld Junior Diving Championships in Tucson, Arizona in the 3 meter synchronized springboard event, but only managed a tenth-place finish in the 3 meter solo event.
Hixon won in the 3 meter springboard event at a national selection camp and qualified for Youth Olympic trials in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he won a bronze medal and thus secured a spot to represent the United States at the 2010 Summer Youth Olympics in the 3 meter springboard event. The event in the first-ever Youth Olympics in Singapore consisted of a 15-man preliminary round and an eight-man final round. After the ten-dive preliminary round, Hixon carried over enough points into the final to begin the final round in third. Although he was sixth after his first dive in the final and fourth heading into his final dive, a poor dive by Italy's Giovanni Tocci allowed Hixon to claim bronze on his final dive, finishing with a score of 554.65 points behind Qiu Bo of China and Oleksandr Bondar of Ukraine.
Hixon qualified for and represented the United States in both the 3 metre synchronized and men's individual 3 metre springboard events at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio. He teamed up with Sam Dorman on the 3 metre synchro only after team changes in March 2016, but won the U.S. trials in their first competition together in June 2016. In the men's 3 meter springboard synchro event, Hixon along with his diving partner Sam Dorman was placed second and won the silver medal with a score of 450.21, behind Jack Laugher and Chris Mears of Great Britain but in front of the Chinese pair Qin Kai and Cao Yuan. In the men's individual 3 metre springboard, he finished 10th, while his former 3 metre synchro partner Kristian Ipsen placed fifth in the same event.
