UNC swimming and diving teams prepare for ACC Championships

After a season full of ups and downs, the North Carolina swimming and diving teams are excited to display their raw talent and prove themselves as the ACC's best in this year’s conference championship next week in Atlanta.

With many impressive performances at the ACC Championship last year, expectations are high, but the competitiveness and rigor of this team are even higher. 

“Last year, we really forced ourselves as one of the best diving teams in not just ACC, but the whole NCAA,” senior diver Anton Down-Jenkins said. “Everyone is really excited, and I think our team has improved so much since last year as well because we are all better divers, good athletes and good competitors.”

Down-Jenkins is looking to build on an already impressive career filled with individual accolades. He was named the men’s Most Valuable Diver and Diver of the Year in the ACC last year, and represented New Zealand in the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo. There, he was the first openly-gay diver to ever compete for New Zealand in the Olympics. 

At the 2021 ACC Championship, the women’s swimming and diving team finished in eighth place with a score of 516.5, while the men clinched a sixth-place finish with a total of 729 points.

Although the Tar Heels did not come out on top in the championships last year, several individuals across both teams stood out among the rest, including sophomore diver Aranza Vázquez.

During her first year at UNC, Vázquez broke school records for all three types of dives — platform, 3-meter springboard and 1-meter springboard. 

At her first-ever ACC Championship, she captured gold medals on the platform and for the 3-meter springboard, while claiming a silver medal in the 1-meter springboard competition. After that, Vázquez went on to represent Mexico in the Olympics.

Both her and the rest of the team have been training hard throughout the season to improve their skills for this year’s championships, and are more than prepared to exhibit their growth as a team. 

“We're motivated by giving everything we have, that's all that matters,” Vázquez said. “We're all excited to go there to show them that we are a really good team this season.”

Vázquez knows that to succeed, the entire UNC team will have to work together and bring their best to the pool. The main motivator for the Tar Heels is achieving success through teamwork.

“I think anytime you go into a big conference championship like this, it's all about the team and us going there together as a unit and to try and accumulate as many points as possible,” swimming and diving head coach Mark Gangloff said. “I think that this team is the most connected and unified of any team that I've had so far.”

In their most recent meet together, both the women's and men's teams competed on the road to defeat Duke on Jan. 28, which brought the teams to a dual meet record of 3-3 and 2-4, respectively. 

Now heading into conference championships, head diving coach Yaidel Gamboa said his competitive spirit naturally drove him towards wanting his team to win it all. And as long as they were putting out their best effort, he would be happy with their performance.

"I'm very excited and very proud just knowing that their best effort was out there," Gamboa said. "And if we were not good enough, that's fine — we can go back to practice and come back stronger."

No matter how the team performed during the regular season, Gangloff has no doubt that the ACC Championship will be nothing short of an outstanding performance by the entire team.

“I think we're gonna have our best competition of the year so far,” Gangloff said. “We're lining up more than ever for this to be our best of ACC championships. I'm excited.”  

@dthsports | sports@dailytarheel.com