Light Blue's Collazo creates splash off platform

Jason CProxy-Connection: keep-alive
Cache-Control: max-age=0

lazo did Columbia proud.

At NCAA Diving Zone last week, freshman Jason Collazo tried his hand at the 1m, 3m, and platform dives with the ultimate goal of qualifying for the NCAA Championships.

While Collazo didn’t quite qualify for the championships, he represented himself well among the various divers.

Off the 3m board, Collazo scored 230.60 points in the preliminaries. Though it wasn’t enough to earn him a spot in the finals, it was good enough for 29th place out of the 38 participants. Stephen Ferreira from Connecticut led the competition with 349.50 points and Brown’s Charles Kambe, a fellow Ivy Leaguer, finished in second with 338.40 points.

Collazo fared similarly on the 1m board, collecting 230.15 points. This time, out of 39 divers, Collazo finished 31st.

The platform was by far Collazo’s best finish of the meet. While Columbia doesn’t have a platform board in Uris Pool, the coaches made sure Collazo had a board to practice on during their training trip and that he could travel at least a few times this year to pools that did have the appropriate equipment. Coupled with years of experience prior to college and his ability to work on his approaches at Uris, Collazo was still able to perform well despite the lack of ample practice time on the platform board.

Though there were only 12 competitors, Collazo topped his placement in the other two events and finished fifth. Collazo collected 275.15 in the preliminary heat and 513.75 in the finals. The winner of platform was Virginia Polytech’s Logan Shinholser with a stand-out 330.90 points. Second place went to Ancient Eight member Stevie Vines, a Princeton Tiger who earned 293.20.

And while it wasn’t enough to catapult him into the upcoming NCAA Championships, it was a solid showing for the freshman swimmer who has three years ahead of him to really make a splash.