NCAA Women’s Diving Preview: How Zone Scores Project To Impact The Team Race

2024 WOMEN’S NCAA SWIMMING AND DIVING CHAMPIONSHIPS

• March 20-23, 2024
• Gabrielsen Natatorium, Athens, Georgia
• Short Course Yards (25 yards)
• Meet Central
• Psych Sheets
• SwimSwam Preview Index
• SwimSwam Pick ‘Em Contest
• Live Results
• Live Stream

The Women’s NCAA Championships kick off tonight from Athens, and the question that always comes up pre-meet will try to be determined in this article: How will diving impact the team race?

When we score out the psych sheets, we know things aren’t going to go exactly as projected for a myriad of factors, with things such as taper, nerves, event schedules and everything else playing into how swimmers perform on the big stage.

In diving, there’s a different set of variables at play, as the NCAA qualifiers competed at five different Zone meets last week, meaning there were five different sets of judges. Therefore, comparing scores across multiple meets is far from being an exact, definitive ranking, but it does give us some indication of who the favorites are heading into NCAAs.

Below, find the top 16 scores in each of the three women’s diving events across the five Zone meets (using finals results only), and how they would stack up against one another in an NCAA scoring format.

WOMEN’S 1-METER

WOMEN’S 3-METER

WOMEN’S PLATFORM

The names atop the rankings tell us there is some accuracy here. Texas’ Hailey Hernandez is an Olympian and was 4th on 1-meter last season, so her leading that event checks out. The same goes for Aranza Vazquez Montano, who swept the springboard events at NCAAs last season.

On platform, Duke’s Aliyah Watson leads the Zone scores but was only 36th in the event at the 2023 NCAAs. She did improve 37 points from last year’s Zone performance, but the likes of Montserrat Lavenant, Viviana Del Angel and Skyler Liu would have to be favored over her at NCAAs given they were 2-3-4 in the event last season (Delaney Schenll, now graduated, won).

If the points were distributed based on Zone scores, Texas would lead the field with 64, followed by Minnesota, Indiana, LSU and Purdue.

SCORING THE ZONE RESULTS – TEAM STANDINGS

If we add in the projected diving scores with the psych sheet scores from the swimming events, here are the key takeaways:

• Virginia’s lead over Texas falls from 100 to 38 points for the national title
• Texas extends its lead from three points to 36 points over Florida for 2nd
• USC inches ahead of Stanford for 5th after they were tied based solely on swimming
• Indiana jumps up from 11th to 7th thanks to their 49 diving points
• UNC jumps up from 20th to 16th thanks to their 37 diving points
• UCLA more than doubled their point total, but still only moved up one spot in the team race
• LSU jumps up from 25th to 20th with 40 diving points
• Purdue, Kansas, Penn State and Notre Dame had zero psych sheet swimming points, but move into the standings thanks to diving
• Purdue is the only team in that group to crack the top 25, sitting in 23rd with 40 diving points

PROJECTED SCORES: PSYCH SHEETS + ZONE RESULTS