UCLA swimming and diving looks to wipe consecutive losses at Pac-12s

With the Bruins heading to one of the biggest stages of their season, swimming coach Cyndi Gallagher had a small word of advice for her team.

“You’re never remembered for one swim at one meet,” Gallagher said. “Your whole career is what you come in (and do) every day. That’s who you are.”

Coming off of three straight losses to conference opponents, the No. 19 UCLA swimming and diving team travels to the Pacific Northwest this Wednesday through Saturday to compete in the Pac-12 championship at the Weyerhaeuser King County Aquatic Center in Federal Way, Washington.

For the first time this season, all eight divers will be on the travel squad. Unlike dual meets, the conference championship will include the platform diving event.

Gallagher and diving coach Tom Stebbins said they believe that competing with twice as many divers will provide UCLA with its best chance matching No. 1 Stanford, No. 4 USC and No. 6 California.

“We always look at it based on where we think we can maximize our point output,” Stebbins said. “I feel really fortunate that all eight will be official. They’ll all have an opportunity to produce points and score for us.”

Roster decisions like this happen before almost every Pac-12 championship because swimmers and divers count differently for competition purposes.

“We have a certain travel squad size limit and divers count as half (a swimmer),” Gallagher said. “We try to figure out who at this point in the season is the most likely to score.”

After an error-filled performance against the Trojans at the Bruins’ last meet on Feb. 12, the loss on the 3-meter dive still lingers in the minds of Stebbins and sophomore Maria Polyakova.

Polyakova, who struggled on the 3-meter dive, was coming off of a competition in Russia. Undefeated on the 3-meter dive entering the meet, Polyakova looked physically and mentally exhausted, finishing fourth.

“I didn’t really dive 3-meter a lot when I got back from Russia,” Polyakova said. “I was having a hard time.”

Although Polyakova has been a leader for the Bruins – winning 12 of 14 events on the year – Stebbins would’ve liked to see some of his other divers step up and fill the void.

“There was a lot of opportunity for other people to step up and take the win,” Stebbins said. “(Junior) Annika (Lenz) had a chance and missed a dive, (freshman) Éloïse (Bélanger) had a chance and missed a dive.”

If Polyakova and Lenz are able to regain the form they showed at the Bruin Diving Invitational in mid-January, they’ll almost certainly sweep the springboard and platform events. For Lenz, her performance was as good as, if not better than, the first time she broke the platform record at the USA Diving National Championships in 2014.

“Her list in the final of the Bruin invite was better than the list she did at USA nationals,” Stebbins said. “Had that list been done at the national meet I don’t know what her number would’ve been.”

In the pool, the Bruins will be seeking to guarantee a swimming representative at the NCAA championship meet. Although the swimming team has produced 26 NCAA “B” qualifying times, which make individuals eligible for possible selection to the competition, it has failed to record an “A” time, which would lock up an individual spot in the meet.