University of Tennessee Athletics
Four Divers Set for Zone Meet
March 09, 2015 | Swimming & Diving
March 9, 2015
Athens, Ga. -- Four Tennessee divers are looking to advance to the national springboards this week at the NCAA Zone B Diving Championships at Greensboro Aquatic Center.
This unique three-day diving meet runs Monday through Wednesday serves as regional qualifying for the NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships later this month. There are five zone competitions around the country this week.
Athens will host divers from UGA, UT, Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Duke, Georgia Tech, North Carolina, NC State, South Carolina, Clemson, East Carolina, Florida Atlantic, Florida Gulf Coast, Florida International, Florida State and Miami.
In a new format to the Zone B meet that will give more divers a chance to qualify for the NCAA Championships, the top four male divers and top five female divers from all three diving events will move on to the NCAAs.
Additional spots will be determined by the number of divers from that zone which finished in the top-16 of last year's NCAA CHampionships, which means that there could be as many as 25 divers going from each gender from the three events.
All four divers qualified for zones in all three events during the 2014-15 regular sseason, and the quartet of Sarah Chewning, Liam Stone, Mauricio Robles and Michael Howell will look to continue their postseason run in either Greensboro, N.C., and Iowa City, Iowa.
Robles and Stone compete in Athens after a successful week in Auburn, Ala., at the 2015 SEC Championships. Both divers earned a gold medal in the one-meter and the three-meter springboard competition respectively. Robles also earned a bronze medal in the three-meter, giving the Vols two medals in the same event.
Robles started the SECs by winning the first gold medal of the week in one-meter, thanks to a UT school record-setting performance of 421.15 to claim first place two Tuesdays ago. The redshirt junior has won 13 competitions across the three events this season, finishing no lower than third place during the regular season.
Stone, a freshman from New Zealand which joined the team in January for their first SEC road meets at Texas A&M and Louisiana State, won the gold medal in the three-meter springboard a couple days after Robles' gold medal win, setting a new SEC and UT record with a 463.50 score. In his first semester Knoxville, Stone also finished no lower than third place in any dual meet this 2014-15 season.
Howell qualified for zones in the one-meter in his first dual meet of the season, where he broke the 300-point mark at UNC Wilmington this September. After showing improvements between his freshman and sophomore campaigns, Howell set a pair of career-high scores in the SEC preliminaries for the three-meter (318.75) as well as the platform (279.50).
Representing Tennessee as the lone female diver after Samantha Lera's injury in January, Chewning competed in the SEC Championships in what was her first event of the spring semester after recovering from an injury herself. The redshirt junior set a pair of career-high scores during the regular season, both in Chapel Hill, N.C. She earned 272.63 in the three-meter during UT's dual meet against UNC and then returned a month later to score a 286.20 during the one-meter prelims of the 2014 Nike Cup.
"With one less spot than we had a year ago, it's going to be really tight," Parrington said. "The women's field is extremely deep. Tori has proved in the past she's able to perform very well at this meet heading into NCAAs."
Lera finished ninth on 1-meter at the SEC meet, just missing the eight-diver final. She nearly qualified for NCAAs as a freshman.
Live results are available via DiveMeets.com
