Women Take Third, Men Fourth for Utah Diving on Day One in Texas
AUSTIN, Texas – The University of Utah women's diving team earned third place and the men's squad placed fourth as the Texas Diving Invitational got underway on Wednesday with a team diving competition inside the Lee and Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center.
"I'm really excited with how the team event went," said diving coach Richard Marschner. "It was a really cool experience for our athletes to be able to have that team environment and really dive for each other. We had some really good efforts. Our 10m dives were great. We were just off on a couple and we just missed the podium on the men's side by a very slim margin. We were third on women's side, which was really cool. We beat some good teams and we're looking forward to tomorrow."
The format for this competition consisted of three divers per school per gender on each team, with each student-athlete performing two dives and at least two dives were required to be attempted from the 1m, 3m and platform. Each team had to execute at least one dive of every category and the sum of the scores for all six dives served as the team score.
For Utah women's divers, Kathryn Grant handled the platform dives, while Lizzy DeCecco was the squad's 1m diver and Holly Waxman took care of the 3m dives. The work of these three allowed the Utes to finish ahead of Notre Dame and Stanford and snag third with a score of 279.40.
Jenner Pennock, Luke McDivitt and Ben Smyth were Utah's three competitors in the men's event, with Pennock performing the inward 2 ½ on the 1m and the back twister on the 10m. McDivitt was responsible for the reverse back handstand off the platform and the back-front 3 ½ off the 3m board and Smyth performed the reverse 2 ½ on the 1m and the back 2 ½ on the 3m. Pennock's, McDivitt's and Smyth's efforts propelled Utah ahead of Notre Dame and Stanford on the men's side as well and racked up 345.15 points.
Looking Ahead
Three more days of competition remain for the Utes in Austin and Thursday's festivities will begin with the men's 1m prelims at 10 a.m.
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