Texas Men Add Third Diver On Final Day of Zone D Champs

2017 NCAA ZONE DIVING

• Zones A, B, D & E: Monday, March 6 – Wednesday, March 8
• Zone C: Thursday, March 9 – Saturday, March 11
• Host schools:
  • Zone A: Virginia Tech
  • Zone B: Auburn
  • Zone C: Indiana
  • Zone D: Missouri
  • Zone E: Northern Arizona
• NCAA selection primer

The Texas men will have 3 divers for the NCAA championships, where they’ll push for a 3rd-straight national title. That’s thanks to Jacob Cornish, who qualified on the final day of Zone Ds.

Zone D results

Cornish was 7th on platform, earning an NCAA bid, though not NCAA reimbursement. He joins Mark Anderson and Grayson Campbell on the Longhorn NCAA roster, which now has 15 swimmers and 3 divers. It’s hard to project which divers will score at NCAAs, given the relative subjectivity of scoring between different zones. But Cornish did finish two spots ahead of a 2016 NCAA scorer in Kyle Goodwin of Mizzou, who was 13th at NCAAs last year but just 9th at Zones this week.

Texas A&M’s Tyler Henschel won the men’s event, though he’d already booked an NCAA trip. He denied a sweep to LSU’s Juan Hernandez, who won 1-meter and 3-meter but was second on platform. The men’s side had a lot of athletes double up in high finishes, meaning reimbursement status trickled all the way down to the 5th and 6th place finishers in a few events.

Nebraska’s Abigail Knapton won the women’s platform after Minnesota’s Yu Zhou won the other two events. Missouri had a good day, qualifying two new divers in Madeline McKernan and Alexa Beckwith. The Texas women also added a third diver in Sofia Rauzi and Texas A&M got Alais Kalonji into NCAAs to have a diving presence on the women’s side.

(Athletes in bold are locked in for NCAA reimbursement. Athletes who have doubled up on qualifying spots are noted with a line through their lower priority slot.)

NCAA ZONE QUALIFYING PROCEDURES

From our refresher post, which you can find here.

Divers qualify for the NCAA Championships through Zone Meets spread across the country. Each zone earns a set number of NCAA qualifying spots based on the performances of that Zone at NCAAs in the past.

Here are the qualifying spots for each event in each zone:

WOMEN

MEN

According to the rules set in 2015 that allowed more divers into the meet, any diver who lands in the qualifying spots for their zone earns a spot to compete in the NCAA Championships. If the diver earns eligibility in one event, they can automatically compete in any of the other two events at NCAAs as long as they finished in the top 12 in their zone in that event.

The NCAA made a distinction between “eligible” and “reimbursed” athletes. Divers qualifying outside of the reimbursement spots will not have their travel, lodging, or meet expenses covered by the NCAA.  Instead the individual school must decide if they’re willing to pay the bill themselves to give that diver an opportunity to participate in the NCAA Championships.

A priority chart determines who gets the reimbursement spots. The first priority spot is taken by the winner of each event beginning with the 3-meter champ, followed by the 1-meter champ and then the platform champ. If an athlete wins two events, they will still only take up one slot which means the NCAA will keep adding rows to this chart until the zone meet reimbursement quota is met.