The Bobcats have flipped and twisted themselves with easiness through the regular season, broke school records, and earned the best diving score at a Mid-American Conference championship in program history.
Now that the postseason has arrived, however, Ohio’s easiness has disappeared.
After the first day of the NCAA Zone Championships at Purdue, Haleigh Bartlett, Kristin Capcik, Morgan Srail and MaryRose Hillstrom placed 39th, 24th, 23rd and 32nd in the 3-meter preliminary round, respectively and were far from placing in the top 18 to advance to the final.
“I’m a little disappointed,” Ohio diving coach Russ Dekker said “They didn’t compete as well as they have throughout the season.”
The meet were meant to crown Ohio’s outstanding season. After several good practices during spring break and this week, the four divers were confident to improve last year’s result and even dreamed about qualifying for the NCAA championship.
“Everybody hoped to be a bit better,” Dekker said.
Even hours after the competition he still tried to figure out what went wrong Friday. It could have been the longer break in between the dives. With a total of 55 divers competing, one’s break sometimes accumulated to 25 minutes. It could have also been the tougher scoring.
“The competition was disappointing for a lot of people, but the cards don’t always fall in your way,” he said.
Although three of nine NCAA invitations are already rewarded, three more invitations will be given out tomorrow in the 1-meter diving competition.
It will be Ohio’s last chance to rewrite its season ending because they won’t compete in the platform competition Saturday.
“It is part of sports and also part of life that you sometimes don’t compete (the way) you want to,” Dekker said. “But you can’t go back and change it. We try to do it better Friday.”
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