Ohio State Men Qualify 3 NCAA Divers On Day 1 of Zone C Champs

The Ohio State Buckeyes added 3 male divers to their NCAA roster on opening night of the Zone C Championships, while the Indiana women qualified a pair of divers.

Full results

Ohio State’s Zhipeng Zeng won the men’s 3-meter, gaining the top NCAA reimbursement spot of the meet.* Stephen Romanik was 4th and Clay White 9th to both qualify as well.

*Read up on the particulars of the NCAA selection system at the bottom of this post.

A potential factor in the women’s NCAA team race: Indiana qualified a pair of divers on night 1. Michal Bower was 4th on 1-meter and Lacey Houser 8th. Another team with top 10 potential that earned a diving berth was Louisville, which got Andrea Aquista in with an 11th-place finish.

The full qualifying list is below. 11 women and 8 men will earn NCAA reimbursement, while the rest of the qualifiers are eligible to compete at NCAAs on their school’s dime.

Priority Finisher Women Men
1 3-meter Champ Zhipeng Zeng, OSU
2 1-meter Champ Pei Lin, MI (OH)
3 Platform Champ
4 3-meter 2nd Joseph Cifelli, PUR
5 1-meter 2nd Mary-Beth Dunnichay, PUR
6 Platform 2nd
7 3-meter 3rd Joshua Arndt, IU
8 1-meter 3rd Kaixuan Zhang, SIU
9 Platform 3rd
10 3-meter 4th Stephen Romanik, OSU
11 1-meter 4th Rebecca Hamperian, KY
12 Platform 4th
13 3-meter 5th Andrew Cramer, NU
14 1-meter 5th Michal Bower, IU
15 Platform 5th
16 3-meter 6th Max Showalter, PUR
17 1-meter 6th Lindsey Streepey, ND
18 Platform 6th
19 3-meter 7th Sebastian Masterton, KY
20 1-meter 7th Emma Gaboury, ND
21 Platform 7th
22 3-meter 8th Thomas Gillis, EMU
23 1-meter 8th Lacey Houser, IU
24 Platform 8th
25 3-meter 9th Clay White, OSU
26 1-meter 9th Courtney Clark, KY
27 Platform 9th
28 3-meter 10th
29 1-meter 10th Alice Hottensmith, AKR
30 Platform 10th
31 3-meter 11th
32 1-meter 11th Andrea Aquista, LOU
33 Platform 11th
34 3-meter 12th
35 1-meter 12th Olivia Rosendahl, NU

(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

1M 3M PLATFORM
Zone A 5 6 6
Zone B 9 8 7
Zone C 12 7 10
Zone D 6 9 9
Zone E 9 11 9

 

Men

1M 3M PLATFORM
Zone A 4 5 4
Zone B 10 10 8
Zone C 7 9 8
Zone D 7 7 8
Zone E 8 5 8

Any diver who finishes within the qualifying spots for their zone earns eligibility for the NCAA Championships. Any diver who earns eligibility in one event can compete in any of the other two events at NCAAs, provided they finished inside the top 12 in their zone in that event.

The final wrinkle is a new rule from last season that makes a distinction between “eligible” athletes and “reimbursed” athletes. The NCAA loosened its rules last season to allow more divers into the meet, but divers qualifying under the new rules do not recieve reimbursement from the NCAA for their travel, lodging and meet expenses – that means it’s up to the individual school to decide if they will foot the bill themselves to allow the diver to compete at NCAAs.

Each zone has a set number of reimbursement spots between the three events combined:

WOMEN MEN
Zone A 5 4
Zone B 8 9
Zone C 11 8
Zone D 7 8
Zone E 10 6

The spots are determined by a priority chart. The winners of each event have first priority, starting with the 3-meter champ, then the 1-meter champ, then the platform champ. After that, the runners-up are added in the same order. If an athlete wins both 1-meter and 3-meter, they still only take one reimbursement slot, meaning the NCAA will keep adding rows of this chart until the reimbursement quota for that zone is met.

2
Leave a Reply

Subscribe
Notify of

2 Comments
newest
oldest most voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
John
8 years ago

This is not even close to the swim of the week. Try Abbey Weitzeil 50 free.

Why has this comment been denied by the moderator?

Admin
Reply to  John
8 years ago

Hi John – all new commenters must go through a moderation process before their comments will show up live on the site. It’s a spam control measure. One strategy to minimize the delay in posting your comments is to stop changing your name and email address every time you comment. But, if you wish to continue to do so, your comments will continue to be kicked to the moderation queue before they’re live on the site.

About Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson

Jared Anderson swam for nearly twenty years. Then, Jared Anderson stopped swimming and started writing about swimming. He's not sick of swimming yet. Swimming might be sick of him, though. Jared was a YMCA and high school swimmer in northern Minnesota, and spent his college years swimming breaststroke and occasionally pretending …

Read More »