University of Houston Athletics
Swimming and Diving Well Represented at NCAA Championships
3/19/2003 12:00:00 AM | Swimming & Diving
March 19, 2003
AUBURN, Ala. - The University of Houston diving program will be well represented this week at the 2003 NCAA Championships in Auburn, Ala.
Divers Yulia Pakhalina and Azul Almazan will each compete in a pair of events for the Cougars after qualifying during last weekend's NCAA Zone D Diving Meet.
Pakhalina, a three-time NCAA national champion, looks to defend her two-time crown on the 3-meter springboard and recapture the title on the 1-meter board that she won in 2001.
Almazan will be competing in her first NCAA Championships on the 3-meter springboard and the platform.
The 2003 NCAA Championships will be held at the James E. Martin Aquatics Center beginning on Thursday and continuing through Saturday. The 1-meter diving event will be held Thursday with the 3-meter competition to be held on Friday.
The platform diving event will be held on Sunday.
Diving preliminaries are scheduled to begin each day at 1 p.m. with the finals slated to start around 7 p.m.
A native of Penza, Russia, Pakhalina has established herself as one of the finest divers in the world. She has never lost on the 3-meter springboard in 31 career collegiate diving events and won back-to-back NCAA individual national championships in that event in 2001 and 2002.
Pakhalina has been twice honored as the Conference USA Diver of the Meet and won both springboard championships at the league's annual meet in 2002 and 2003. An amazing 11-time winner of the C-USA Diver of the Week award, she has won 62 times in 64 events during her collegiate career.
She easily qualified for the NCAA Championships with a dominating performance at the NCAA Zone D Diving Meet last weekend. Pakhalina started the meet on the 3-meter board, emerging as the only diver to score more than 600 points and one of only two divers to score more than 500 points in the event.
She followed that with a 118-point win over the second-place finisher in the 3-meter competition the next day.
With a sweep of both springboard events at the 2003 meet, Pakhalina will surpass Diane Johannigman for the most NCAA individual championships in program history. Johannigman, a letterwinner at year from 1978 to 1981, captured a total of four national titles in the 100-yard and 200-yard butterfly from 1978-80.
Almazan is in her first year of competition at UH after sitting out a year ago with a redshirt. The Mexico City, Mexico, native was also named the C-USA Diver of the Week once during the regular season and was named the league's Freshman Diver of the Year, the second consecutive year that a Cougar has won that award.
Almazan surprised many with her second-place finish on the 3-meter board at the Diving Zone Meet last weekend and joined Pakhalina as the only divers to score more than 500 points in the finals.
After sitting out the 1-meter event, Almazan finished second on the platform with 387.40 points.
Both divers have worked under the tutelage of UH head diving coach Jane Figueiredo, one of the finest diving coaches in the nation.
This season marks the 13th consecutive season that Figueiredo has guided at least one diver to the NCAA Championships. Her coaching resume is dotted with awards, including back-to-back honors as the C-USA Coach of the Year in 2002 and 2003 and the NCAA Diving Coach of the Year in 2001.
Figueiredo was also recognized as the National Independent Conference Diving Coach of the Year in 1998 and 2001.
