Cal Poly cuts swim team but adds STUNT and maybe flag football. How is that fair? | Opinion

In a move calculated to boost the number of female athletes at Cal Poly, the university has elevated STUNT from a club team to a varsity sport, starting in the upcoming academic year.

STUNT is cheerleading on overdrive — it requires jumping, tumbling, balancing, speed, strength, agility, poise, impeccable timing and strong nerves. In competition, judges look at athletic ability, rather than at skills like crowd appeal and choreography.

Cal Poly is very good at STUNT; its club team won a national championship in 2023.

We support the university’s decision — it’s good to see these talented athletes take center stage — but we can’t help thinking that swimmers and divers got a raw deal.

In a move that took athletes by surprise, the university announced in March that it was dissolving the men’s and women’s swim and dive teams due to lack of funding. It later agreed to reverse the decision if the team raised $25 million — an amount later reduced, first to $20 million and finally to $15 million.

In a short amount of time, supporters managed to raise more than $9 million, but that was not enough to keep the team afloat.

Is varsity thumb-wrestling coming?

Cal Poly may also add another up-and-coming sport for women athletes. Athletic director Don Oberhelman announced that women’s flag football could become a varsity sport, possibly as early as 2027.

Perhaps the decisions to cut swimming and diving while adding two other sports were not connected, but the optics are awful. And in a pouring-salt-in-the-wound-move, Oberhelman appeared to imply that the swim and dive team wasn’t competitive enough.

“One of our guiding principles for Cal Poly Athletics is participating in sports where we can be competitive,” he wrote in a letter that announced the changes.

That did not go over well.

“... The ‘guiding principle’ is to focus on sports that the university can be competitive in? So just keep moving downward to more obscure sports? Is varsity thumb-wrestling coming?” a disgruntled poster wrote on SwimSwam, a website devoted to swimming news.

Kim Carlson, the former interim head coach of Poly’s swim team, told SF Gate the comment “was another slap in the face.”

“We had such a successful year, you know, so many school records broken on the men’s side and the women’s side, and just improvement overall, so dramatically in the Big West,” she said. “We were definitely on the rise.”

Title IX complaint

Meanwhile, two advocacy groups have accused Cal Poly of violating the federal government’s Title IX regulations by disbanding the women’s swim team, since that reduced the number of opportunities for women to participate in sports at Cal Poly.

“Evidence we have reviewed is clear: In Cal Poly’s athletic department, male students are receiving disproportionately more participation opportunities than female students, more athletic scholarship dollars, as well as more favorable treatment and benefits,” the complaint letter states.

It requests that Cal Poly reinstate women’s swimming, boost scholarships and create a plan that puts more focus on women’s sports.

The university is already attempting to draw more women into athletes.

Elevating STUNT to a varsity sport could potentially add up to 65 slots for women athletes, though there are only 36 on the current roster. (Men are allowed to participate as well, but apparently Cal Poly expects the sport will be dominated by women.) The addition of a women’s flag football team will increase the number of opportunities even more.

Cal Poly deserves credit for creating a diverse athletic program for women, but it’s disappointing that the more traditional sports of swimming and diving would be cut — especially on the California Coast, where conditions for water sports are ideal.

Cal Poly’s tone-deaf handling of the situation is even more disturbing. If the university sincerely wanted to save the swim and dive teams, it would have given supporters more time to fundraise. The fact that they were able to raise $9 million in the matter of a couple of months speaks to a high level of commitment.

And finally, why all the emphasis on winning? Since when is that a “guiding principle”? After all, the university’s motto is “learn by doing” — not “learn by winning.”

The Cal Poly football team certainly isn’t “learning by winning.” It hasn’t had a winning record in nearly a decade.

Same with the men’s basketball team. That run of futility is 12 years.

If we’re going to judge athletic success at the college level based on a team’s wins and losses, then Cal Poly should retire more than the swim team.

But of course, that would never happen to a fan-favorite, top-tier sport.

Instead, we strongly urge the university to revisit its decision to end varsity-level swimming and diving.