Hawkeye Student-Athlete Brings Cliff Diving Experience to Big Ten Pools
Perched at the edge of a cliff 65 feet above the waves, Zita Bernatsky launches herself into the air, performs a series of twists and turns—and makes hardly a splash.
The University of Iowa sophomore was an accomplished cliff diver as a teenager with the Red Bull High School program, traveling to Austria to leap into freezing alpine water, then into Turkey’s deep blue Mediterranean waves. Bernatsky gave up cliff diving for a place on the UI swimming and diving team, a decision she says came easy after visiting the campus from her native Winnipeg, Canada, and feeling “immediately at home.”
Her season-best score of 321.80 on the 3-meter dive was the highest on the Hawkeye team last season, and she ranked ninth all-time at Iowa on the platform dive. Her first year was a success, but now in her sophomore year, she has one big goal in mind: qualify for the NCAA championships.
“I was just a couple points off,” says Bernatsky, who was named to this season’s Big Ten Athletes to Watch list. “My other goal is to perform my best—to continue building my dives, making them better with a higher difficulty.”
As for cliff diving, Bernatsky says she might catapult off the sides of mountains again after graduation, when she’s free of the demands of school and college athletics.