Diver Heads to NCAA Zones

Shannon Hosey's career changed the moment that she realized she was too tall.

A gymnast prior to the beginning of high school, Hosey endured an injury that prevented her from advancing in her gymnastics career, and so she turned to diving to fulfill her athletic needs.

"I did gymnastics for about seven years, and I quit right before high school," the School of Engineering and Applied Science sophomore said. "I had come to a wall in competitions, and it's [gymnastics is] a hard sport to do when you're a lot taller. I was trying to find a sport similar to gymnastics that I could be good at."

Thus began a diving career that would prove fruitful once Hosey made the difficult decision to compete at Columbia. After a career as a celebrated diver at Hopewell High School in Cornelius, N.C., Hosey had an array of options to choose from when it came time to apply to colleges.

"I actually applied to seven schools and got recruited by six of them," Hosey said. The six included Columbia, Georgia Tech, Virginia Tech, and the University of Virginia, as well as hometown schools North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina. Despite being forced to choose between a number of institutions with storied athletic programs, Hosey managed to narrow her choices to two and only went on recruiting trips to Columbia and Georgia Tech.

Ultimately, the decision came down to her educational needs, which she felt were more fulfilled by Columbia. "I thought it was the best institution out of all of them for what I wanted to do," she said.

Now, the second-year SEAS student has no regrets about her decision, as her hard work has clearly paid off. After a good start during her freshman year in which she posted the 13th best all-time Columbia diving score in the three-meter diving event, Hosey returned this year to better her success. She began the season well, winning her first diving event of the year, the one-meter dive against Dartmouth. She picked up the only two individual wins in an early season loss to Yale, placing first in both diving events while easily defeating her opponents.

Her success reached the next level on homecoming weekend, when she qualified for the NCAA Zone Diving Championships in Columbia's Jan. 20 victory against Bucknell. Hosey posted a score of 293 in the three-meter that surpassed the Zone standard of 265 points. The championships, which take place in Piscataway, N.J. on March 1-2, feature the best divers from the Northeast zone. Despite experiencing success so early in her collegiate career, Hosey remains realistic as far as her expectations for this weekend and is determined to look toward the future, no matter what the outcome is at the championships.

"Our season ended a week and half ago, but my hopes aren't really high because I've never been to this level of the competition before," Hosey said. "I'm just hoping to make preliminaries and then improve next year."

Hosey will be joined by Columbia College junior Justin Reardon from the men's team, who qualified for Zones in the Lions' Jan. 13 loss to Princeton.