The UCLA women’s dive team put in a strong performance over the weekend at the UCLA Invitational, sweeping wins in all three events, with three different divers winning event titles.
In Saturday’s 1m and 3m springboard competition, senior Marisa Samaniego took the 1m crown with a score of 265.30, and freshman Alyssa Robinson followed up that performance, winning the 3m with a tally of 239.95.
The Bruins kept up the pressure on Sunday, when they returned for the tower competition. Senior Tess Schofield took the tower competition with a score of 244.90.
Samaniego said the event wins over strong teams like Stanford and California was good for the team’s confidence heading into Pac-10 duel meets in a few weeks.
“I think it was a really good weekend overall,” Samaniego said. “It was awesome to be able to win all three events. We didn’t dive as well as we wanted to be diving, but we stuck to the things that we’ve been working on, and everything is slowly but surely starting to come together. I think when the time comes for the bigger meets, everything will fall into place.”
As Samaniego noted, the team’s high finishes were a positive, but the raw scores could have been higher. Both Samaniego and her senior teammate Shannon Pirozzi agreed that they expect higher scores from themselves and from perennial powerhouse Stanford later in the year.
“It’s definitely a little bit of a confidence booster, to know that we are as good as a Stanford team,” Samaniego said. “I know they will be diving better when we get to Pac-10s than they did this weekend. But it is good to know that we are capable of beating them because they are very good divers.”
The meet, which included Stanford, Cal, and UC Irvine along with the Bruins served as a sort of mini Pac-10 meet, which will help prepare UCLA to face off against the Bay Area schools later in the year.
In addition to the event wins, the meet was highlighted by a second-place finish on tower by senior Brittany Hill, and sophomore Laura Winn’s return to the 3m after a major injury last year.
With two weeks before the team’s next meet at home against Washington, Pirozzi said that the team is improving.
“I think we’re in a good spot,” Pirozzi said. “We are kind of straddling the line between getting better and going down and we just need to continue the upward momentum we started already this season.”