Florida, Georgia, Tennessee Add NCAA Divers At Zone B’s Day 1

Zone B’s opening day of diving gave a number of potential top-10 teams added scoring threats on the boards, with Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Auburn and Alabama all qualifying divers for NCAAs.

Full results

You can check out the full qualifying procedures at the bottom of this post.

Florida’s Kahlia Warner won the women’s 1-meter event to book her trip to NCAAs. She was an NCAA finalist in that event a year ago.

Second behind her was Georgia’s Olivia Ball, whom the Bulldogs took to NCAAs last year in place of a freshman swimmer, as Georgia was up against the 18-person roster limit. This year, Ball and the swimmer, now-sophomore Stephanie Peters, will make the team together, with Georgia only qualifying 12 swimmers.

For the men, Tennessee’s Mauricio Robles led the way, with teammate Liam Stone second. Also from returning top-10 programs, Auburn’s Justin Youtsey is in along with Alabama’s Brent Sagert.

The full qualifying list is below. 8 women and 9 men will earn NCAA reimbursement – at this point, Warner, Ball, NC State’s Rachel Mumma, Robles, Stone and UNC’s Jack Nyquist are all locked into that list.

(Athletes in bold are locked in for NCAA reimbursement.)

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

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:

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