With no fear of heights, Signal Mountain native Marissa Roth achieved the unbelievable.
The South Carolina fifth-year senior saved her best for her last Southeastern Conference swimming and diving meet this past weekend in Athens, Georgia.
Graceful entrances into the water off the 10-meter platform landed Roth atop the podium as the women’s platform diving champion with a score of 304.8 for five dives.
“To have my teammates, family and best friend all cheering me on was a great moment,” Roth said. “I was trying my best to live in the moment and not look at the scoreboard. I wanted to make my last SEC finals fun.”
Attempting her highest degree of difficulty on a back 2 1/2 somersault with a 1 1/2 twist pike, Roth perfected her second dive of the finals to land 10s from the judges and bonus points for an immaculate score of 72 points.
Roth sealed the gold with back-to-back scores of 63 and a 58 to finish 11.9 points ahead of the runner-up in a field of eight finalists.
“We don’t have a diving platform at South Carolina, but this summer we took about six early-morning trips to Athens to practice for three hours off it,” Roth said. “I told my coach (Todd Sherritt), ‘I’ve got this. We’ve worked too hard.’ After my final dive I got out of the pool and said this is not real life, it’s something I dreamed of my whole life.”
The Lady Gamecocks have had two platform divers in the past three seasons win SEC championships.
Roth began diving at the age of 11 for the Signal Mountain Green Giants and then stood out diving with the boys’ team at McCallie with coach Phil Lesselroth.
“Coach Phil and I made the perfect team,” she said. “Diving at McCallie helped me to become a better athlete and push myself. I wanted to do the dives the boys were doing.”
Roth hopes to qualify in the coming weeks for the NCAA tournament.
On top of her athletic achievements she is a five-time SEC honor roll student and was named to the 2017 SEC Community Service Team. Roth received degrees in international business and in global supply chain and operations management. She will have a master’s in IB.
Contact Patrick MacCoon at pmaccoon@timesfreepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @PMacCoon