Complete Release in PDF Format 
By Danielle Musso
Athletic Media Relations
This week…
Colorado State diver Shayna Solomon takes to the 1- and 3-meter boards Thursday and Friday at the NCAA Zone E regional meet in Austin, Texas.
The NCAA Zone E regional meet is being hosted at the Lee & Joe Jamail Texas Swim Center on the campus of the University of Texas and is considered a preliminary for the NCAA swimming and diving championships. In order to qualify for the regional, Solomon had to tally 265 points on the 1-meter and 280 points on the 3-meter in at least one seasonal competition. Solomon tallied these marks a plethora of times, including as many as nine times in the 1-meter event.
Solomon, a sophomore open-option major, enters the preliminary meet with career records of 283.27 points on the 1-meter and 277.12 points on the 3-meter. Both career highs were set at 2009-10 home meets. Solomon’s 1-meter mark came when CSU hosted TCU on Oct. 22, while her 3-meter total was recorded on Jan. 22 when DU came to Moby Pool.
Solomon, a sophomore open option major, competed in the Zone E meet last year and qualified for the finals on the 1-meter board with a combined point total, from the preliminaries and finals, of 441.05, placing her 17th. Solomon’s 3-meter performance landed her 225.30 points and 24th place.
Meet schedule…
Preliminaries and finals of the 1-meter board will take place on Thursday, while 3-meter concludes Solomon’s competition on Friday. Preliminaries begin at 11 a.m. MT and finals start at 1 p.m. MT each day.
Quotes from diving coach Kevin Witt…
On possibly hitting a peak for the Zone E meet:
“It is tough to tell. She is the only one practicing right now, so she is kind of tired and a little worn down from the conference meet. I suspect when we get there it will kick in again a little bit.”
On keeping Solomon motivated, since she is the only CSU diver continuing to practice:
“That is the tough part. She has to remember it is a reward for her and it is a chance to represent CSU. It is a good thing for her to be around all those other divers and coaches. It is recognizing her as one of the better divers around here in the conference and in the zone. I want her to think of it as a reward for working hard and getting those scores. It would be easy to look at everybody else who are on their breaks right now and think, ‘I have to keep working out; I have to keep training,’ but I don’t think she thinks that. I think she is just struggling with keeping her energy level up and getting to the meet, getting through the meet and seeing how she does.”
On MWC championships being an indicator of how she will perform at the zone meet:
“She is pretty competitive anyway. We didn’t do quite as well as we had wanted to last week. She had a really good 1-meter in the consolation final at the conference and if she does that again she will do pretty well. I think, especially on 1-meter, she should be able to be pretty competitive. She is still working on difficulty on 3-meter that will allow her to be competitive with the athletes that will be at this kind of meet. As long as she is consistent she should do OK.”
