Women's Divers Fail To Qualify for NCAA Championship Meet

While most Harvard students were finishing up classes and leaving for spring break on Friday, senior Leslie Rea and sophomores Alex Stanton and Schuyler Moore were already off campus at the NCAA Zone A Diving Championship meet in Buffalo, N.Y.

"That meet's really cool because [you] get to see people who are a lot better than you and just dive with a whole different group than we're used to during our regular season," Stanton said.

After qualifying for the meet during the competition season, the divers needed to take first in the one-meter or the three-meter to continue on to the NCAA Division I Championship meet. The task proved to be too tall for the Crimson divers.

"It's definitely not the best our team has done," Rea said. "But we had [Ivy League] championships two weeks ago, and that's what we train for the entire year. So being able to hold it out for two more weeks is a little rough, but I think for all that we practiced, we did well."

Stanton echoed Rea's sentiments, noting how much preparation went into the Ivy League meet, at which Harvard snatched a first-place victory.

"The two weeks after [the Ivy League meet] are just a hard time because after championships, we want to take a little bit of a break because we were working so hard towards it," Stanton said.  "We were practicing, just not as much as we wanted to, and [we were] just kind of exhausted from the whole season."

While Moore and Stanton—who hit the board on her third dive—finished the one-meter quarter final with scores of 181.55 and 194.9, respectively, Rea's 13th-place finish (240.4) earned her a spot in the finals, as the top 18 advanced to perform six more dives to add on to their preliminary scores. At the end of the day, Rea's consistency had moved her up two places to finish 11th with 480.3 points.

"Technically, the people who are the most consistent, they're the ones who should be on top winning," Rea said.  "But the people who have a good meet the first time and a bad meet the second time, those are the ones who will move down."

Harvard finished out the three-meter diving competition with Rea placing 21st in the quarterfinals with 241.2 points, followed by Stanton in 30th with 227.75 points.

"I'm extremely happy with how it went," Rea said.  "It ended on a really high note.  We were showing...that the Ivy League [belongs] there with the state schools."

—Staff writer Chelsea Gilbert can be reached at cgilbert13@college.harvard.edu.