Lane Bassham NCAA Champ
6/25/2004 12:00:00 AM | Swimming & Diving
2004 NCAA 3m Diving Champion
Lane Bassham
This is the way to go out.
On the last dive of her last event at her last NCAA Championships, Lane Bassham went from All-American standout to national champion, nailing the door shut on the nation’s elite.
At the 2004 NCAA Swimming and Diving Championships, held on the Texas A&M campus, Bassham won the three-meter diving title by throwing the hardest dive in her repertoire as her last dive, passing the handful of competitors who had been trading the lead amongst themselves over the last half of the competition.
Bassham scored 557.75 points in finals to outdistance second place Mandy Moran of Arkansas by more than 15 points. And while the 15 points provided a wide margin of victory, the road to the win was anything but easy.
An excited Pat Greenwell, in his 17th year as the Tide’s diving coach, said, “She threw the hardest dives out there. It was all or nothing and she made it. The lead passed back and forth between several divers and it came down to the last round. Lane threw the highest degree of difficulty. Everyone hit on the last round and Lane came out on top. It was an incredible performance and just an amazing way to close out her career.”
Bassham won the first NCAA Championship for the Tide women in 20 years. The Tide’s last championship was Angelika Knipping’s 50 breaststroke win in 1983. Bassham is the first Tide diver to win a collegiate national championship. Bassham is now one of four women to win collegiate national titles for the Tide. Vicky Stanley and Christina Jarvis combined for six AIAW national titles, in the days before the NCAA included women’s sports and Knipping won the Tide’s first, and until this year, only NCAA title in ’83.
“It was like the end of a long journey,” Greenwell said of Bassham’s victory “I really didn’t see this for her at the start of the season. It was more a matter of just trying to improve and move ahead. As the year went by though, I began to see it as more of a reality, that she could be national champion.”
For Greenwell, Bassham was his second NCAA Champion, joining 1998 NCAA Platform Champion Brent Roberts.
Even prior to the three-meter competition, it had already been a great competition for Bassham. She posted a second place finish off the one-meter board a mere point and a half out of first. And while that was her highest NCAA finish to date, she was not satisfied, nor done.
For much of the three-meter competition, a top-3 finish looked like the best she could do. Bassham was third after the preliminaries. Those scores don’t carry over to finals, but after the first part of the finals competition, Bassham was again in third place, trailing the leader by six and a half points. From there it was a see-saw battle among the top-half of the finals contingent, all of hailed from Southeastern Conference squads.
"It was exciting,” Bassham said after the competition. “It was an exciting final to have a lot of the SEC divers and a lot of the divers I went to the zone meet to compete against. We just have a lot of fun doing it. Any day it could be any one of us and today was my day. It was a lot of fun that way."
In fact, including Bassham, six of the eight competitors in the NCAA three-meter diving finals were from the SEC, a fact that had to give the Tide ace confidence. That confidence came not only with familiarity with her opponents, but from the knowledge that she had beaten them all earlier in the season. In fact, from the first dive of the regular season, Bassham had beaten everyone she faced. She became the first Tide diver in history to go through both the regular season and the SEC Championships undefeated.
She also became the first Tide diver since Barbara Logan in 1981 to win both spring board events at the SEC Championships. She also became the first female Alabama diver since Logan to earn SEC “Diver of the Year” honors. And Greenwell, who had earned the honor four times previously on the men’s side, earned his first SEC Women’s “Diving Coach of the Year” honor. Under his tutelage, Alabama divers have earned SEC Diver of the Year recognition six times since 1990.
And after her performance in College Station, Bassham and Greenwell were honored again, this time on a national scale. Bassham was named “Diver of the Meet” while Greenwell, who also coached sophomore Crystal Rasmussen to All-American honors off the one-meter board, was named “Coach of the Meet”.
“I thought that might be something I’d never obtain in my career,” Greenwell said of the coaching honor. “It is very much one of the highlights of my career. It’s a vote of my peers and that makes it all the sweeter. I’ve seen it go to a lot of close friends in the diving community and I’ve always relished being a in a moment like that. I was particularly excited to be able bring that kind of recognition to the University.”
Winning the national title was Bassham’s brightest moment wearing the crimson and white of Alabama, but it was far from the only bright spot on her Tide resume. As a freshman, the Moultrie, Ga. native was the Tide’s lone competitor at the NCAA Championships, taking the Tide to 27th place by herself. She would earn eight All-American honors during her career and finish in the top-3 in NCAA competition three different times.
What makes her Tide career all the more amazing is that she had wrist surgery after her freshman season which forced her to sit out her second year. She returned with a vengeance in 2002, winning the SEC three-meter title and earning All-American honors off both the one and three-meter boards. She also earned a berth on the U.S. national team after a standout showing at the U.S. National Championships. As a junior, Bassham finished third off the one-meter board at the NCAA Championships and again earned a spot on the U.S. National Team, this time competing in Rome at the ITA Grand Prix, where she took fifth off the three-meter board.
And then she capped her five year Tide experience with a national championship.
“It was a nice highlight at the end of my college career,” Bassham said of her title.
