The Ohio diving team walked away from a four-team meet in Buffalo, N.Y with one first-place finish this past weekend.
The only event with one Ohio diver entered was the most successful, as Olivia Dillon won the Platform dive. Dillon finished the preliminary dives in second place but jumped to first in the final by increasing her score by 30 points. Despite the first-place finish, 249.20 in the final was worse than Dillon dove at the Louisville Invitational in November where she finished in third.
In the 1-meter dive, all three Bobcats were coming off of their personal bests in the dual-meet against Denison and only one moved to the finals in Buffalo. Dillon barely made the final, as she was in eighth-place after the preliminaries with a dive of 223.05 and then moved up to sixth with a 20-point increase in the final.
Nicole Hughes achieved her fourth best performance of the season in the 1-meter but just missed out on a final spot with a dive of 220.05 that put her in ninth-place. Ireland Littlejohn also missed out with an eleventh-place finish but achieved her personal best score of 205.20 after setting it last week against Denison.
Ohio could not replicate its success in Buffalo in the 3-meter of finishing first and second at the meet Jan. 7, as only Dillon made the finals. Hughes struggled as she did not cross the 200-point mark and finished in twelfth-place with a point total of 199.50.
Dillon continued to be the top performer for Ohio with an eight-place finish in the 3-meter dive after her prelims score put her in seventh going into the finals. Dillon’s preliminary score of 247.75 would still have put her in eight place in the final but it was here fourth best score of the season. The score in the final was twenty points lower than seventh-place and a decrease of 16 points from the previous round.
The divers return to Athens to get ready for the next meet Jan. 21 where the whole team will compete against Duquesne and Xavier in two dual-meets at 1 p.m. in Athens.
@TREricWalker
ew399115@ohio.edu
