March 17, 2010
COLUMBIA, S.C. – South Carolina junior diver Taryn Zack will make her third consecutive appearance in the NCAA Women’s Swimming & Diving Championships, which get underway Thursday in West Lafayette, Ind., on the campus of Purdue University.
Zack, a native of Stony Plain, Alberta, Canada, qualified for the championships with a third-place finish on the 3-meter springboard at last week’s NCAA Zone B Diving Regional in Atlanta. She will be the Gamecocks’ lone representative in this year’s championships. She has made two previous appearances in the NCAA Championships, earning two All-America honors in four attempts. This season, she finished fourth on both the 1- and 3-meter boards at the SEC Championships in Athens, Ga., last month, and set the school records on both boards in a meet with UNC Wilmington on Jan. 23 in Columbia.
Last season, Zack battled a wrist injury throughout the second half of the season but still managed to win the SEC Championship on the 1-meter board and qualify for the NCAA Championships with a runner-up showing at the NCAA Zone B meet in Knoxville, Tenn. However, she struggled at the national meet, posting an 18th-place finish on the 1-meter board and a 22nd-place showing in the 3-meter event in College Station, Texas.
As a freshman, Zack earned a pair of All-America certificates with an eighth-place finish in the 3-meter event, scoring 319.35 in the finals. She also took home an 11th-place finish on the 1-meter board at the 2008 championships, which were held in Columbus, Ohio.
Zack is one of eight divers from the Southeastern Conference in the 40-person field for the 1- and 3-meter events. She joins Carrie Dragland (Alabama), Vennie Dantin and Anna Aguero (Auburn), Kara Salamone and Monica Dodson (Florida), Hannah Moore (Georgia) and Lisa Faulkner (Kentucky) to give the SEC one-fifth of the entrants in the diving competition.
Preliminaries for the 1-meter event get underway at 1:30 p.m. Thursday with finals set to begin at 7 p.m. at the Boilermaker Aquatic Center. The same schedule will be followed on Friday for the 3-meter preliminaries and finals. Live results and full coverage of the championships can be followed through NCAA.com.
