Event a platform for postseason
By Chris Chen
March 11, 2009 10:18 p.m.
It’s one thing to ask a team to put together the kind of performance that the UCLA women’s dive team pulled off last week at the Pac-10 Championships.
It’s another thing to ask them to do it again.
The Bruin divers will do their best to duplicate their performance from two weeks ago at another high-profile meet, the NCAA Zone E Championships, which start today.
Held in Austin, Texas, the NCAA Zone meet won’t be foreign territory for the Bruins, as all have visited Austin already this year.
“We all went to the pool in December, so we’ll know what to expect,” senior diver Marisa Samaniego said.
Samaniego was selected as the UCLA/Muscle-Milk Student Athlete of the Week for her performance at Federal Way, where she won the 1M title by posting a season-best score of 320.85. For sophomore diver Laura Winn, returning to Federal Way was a challenge in itself. A year after suffering a major injury there, she went on to have a performance of a lifetime.
But it’s now in the past, and she has new priorities.
“It is definitely a huge weight lifted off my shoulders,” Winn said. “But now I need to go to Zone meet purely focused on diving rather than the emotions I had to deal with at Federal Way.”
The top seven divers in the Zone meet will advance to the NCAA Championships.
“I’m just going to try to have the same confidence that I had going into Pac-10s and put 12 good dives together,” Samaniego said. “Hopefully, it’ll put me in a spot in the NCAAs.”
Landing a spot is difficult, as the field includes powers such as Stanford, Arizona, USC, New Mexico, and Hawaii.
“We are going to have to be sharp ““ there are only seven spots, so we have to be really good to earn one,” Stebbins said.
Also competing are seniors Brittany Hill and Tess Schofield and freshman Alyssa Robinson.
Practices in the week leading up to the NCAA Zone meet have focused on re-establishing the sharp mentality and the confidence the divers brought up with them to Federal Way.
“If we focus on how good we can be, the results will take care of itself,” dive coach Tom Stebbins said. “It’s not something that you can force ““ it’s something that is going to have to come to you.”
But after grinding out a solid week of fine-tuning and charging up for today’s meet, Stebbins is optimistic about how the team will fare this weekend.
“I think we’re very, very good; we have some great pieces, and hopefully they will come together for us,” Stebbins said.
