Shayna Gayer is a political science and journalism junior and is a Mustang News opinion columnist. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
Most Cal Poly students walk past the pool without realizing that an entire team used to train there for 20 hours over six days, every week. On Feb. 15, I competed in the last meet of my diving career, and I had no idea. Worse, 58 of us shared this fate.
I was a Cal Poly diver for two years and was promoted to captain in March for the fall 2025 season. As captains, we believed the team was on the rise after one of our best seasons in Cal Poly history, with the men’s team finishing undefeated in dual meets, Sam Seybold earning Freshman of the Year and new diving records set on platform.
I’m sharing what happened after our team was cut not just to look back, but to show what it feels like when the university takes away the place that felt like home. As a team, we thought we had standing with the university based on our performance this season. As it turned out, we were wrong.
We understood there were outside factors influencing the decision. The athletic department had been under financial strain, and Swim and Dive was one of the programs losing money for the university. Around the same time, Cal Poly and other universities were preparing for the NCAA House settlement, which required major budget adjustments across all athletic programs.
We knew changes would likely be coming, but the way the situation was handled made it feel like the team did not matter to the university. The lack of communication and transparency left us blindsided, and without any chance to fight for our team, or even prepare for what was coming.
Our first captain’s meeting with Coach Kim Carlson felt routine. We sat outside Mott Athletic Center sorting through the usual preseason tasks: gear sizing, welcoming incoming freshmen and planning workouts for captain-led practices during finals week.
At our second meeting as captains, we all crammed into a small room on Henderson Ave with a gut-wrenching feeling. The team got an ominous email from then Athletic Director Don Oberhelman reading, “We are canceling practice tomorrow morning and instead you will have a team meeting with the AD. We need you to be there if possible, this is to provide important updates on our program.”
The team had never gotten an email from Oberhelman as a collective before. We realized we had to prepare for an unofficial disaster. Our team seemed to be on the verge of getting cut.
We devised a plan. We felt responsible for protecting what mattered most for our teammates: the incoming freshmen who had chosen Cal Poly for this team, the priority registration we had been promised and, most importantly, the scholarships many of us depended on. We were ready, and we were not going to be pushed over.
But the two biggest questions didn’t need to be rehearsed or written down: why now? And why not give us a chance to save the team before it was too late?
Facing the truth
We had the whole team show up early to the lawn between Baker and the Faculty East Offices Building before the meeting. We all wore our uniforms, the same uniforms we used to represent Cal Poly athletics a month earlier, as a symbol of protest against the same institution.
As captains, we wanted to be the ones to tell our teammates. They worked just as hard as us during the season and they didn’t deserve to be blindsided. One by one, we each gave a speech to our teammates about how much this team has meant to us and how we will not give up hope for our team.
I focused my speech on the divers, reminding them that we would get through this together. I expressed my gratitude for the community we built and what we were able to accomplish.
Over the last two years, we had become a close-knit group that supported each other through every smack on the water, every laugh in the warm pool and every hard day that each of us had. These people were my family and we were being forced to say goodbye.
The first wave of emotions flooded everyone. Tears and questions were the only things to be heard in the early morning sunrise. We took our time to understand the gravity of the situation, then we pulled ourselves together to walk into that dreaded classroom.
We walked into the meeting with our heads held high, but I felt very different on the inside. Keeping everything together was one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Then Oberhelman walked in, and it felt like a dementor’s ice-cold breeze followed him.
Oberhelman broke the news, and the room was silent. You could hear a pin drop, until the first sniffle was heard, then everyone exploded. I have never seen so many passionate tears in one place at one time.
With those words and the immediate drop of energy from the room, I felt like my soul was forcibly removed from my body.
I will say Oberhelman was respectful enough to answer the questions that we had, but it didn’t feel like enough. Had he treated us with more care as athletes or with more respect as people, we might have felt differently. To many of us, it felt more like the meeting was a weight off his chest, rather than an attempt to work with the team to try and save the program before it was too late. His unemotional and rock-solid demeanor hurt; he looked at us like we were beneath him and no longer his problem.
Oberhelman told us that the athletic department chose not to share the news before our conference meet because they didn’t want to distract us or get into our heads before competition. He said that the financial realities, including budget cuts and the impact of the NCAA House settlement, didn’t become fully clear until we were already at our conference championship in Houston.
To many of us, that explanation felt more like an excuse than an executive decision. Even if that was true, the idea that the athletic department did not fully understand its own financial situation until that moment seemed careless and irresponsible.
How we moved forward
Since that momentous day, Cal Poly swimmers and divers have become more active members in clubs, both academic and athletic. Many joined the Cal Poly Swim Club and have been keeping up their swim careers, some have decided to focus on their courses and others have gotten jobs to fill their time.
I was able to get a part-time job, add a secondary major and join Mustang News. As a former student-athlete, I did not realize how much time I put into my sport until I lost it.
Diving became like an alter ego. When I was at the pool, time disappeared because I was doing what I love. But the transition to retired student-athlete was difficult because I felt like a piece of my identity had been taken away, overnight.
Suddenly, I had free hours that used to be filled with practices, lifts and travel meets. But none of it felt like freedom; it felt like a void. My alarms were still set to go to practice, and having to reset those was just another reminder that my life was about to look very different.
Over the summer, when our team was trying to raise over 10 million dollars in hopes of being reinstated, a new Cal Poly team was announced: Stunt.
It may have been the plan all along to make Cal Poly Stunt a new team, but, to us, it felt like they were twisting a knife in our guts. Instead of wanting to support us, it felt like the athletic department was replacing us with another team.
It felt deeply personal, as if our years of dedication and sacrifice had been traded away for something shinier and more marketable, even if that was not true.
In the weeks after, we tried to move forward as best we could: leaning on each other and trying to navigate the new reality of no longer being student-athletes. We were promised some transitional support, including priority registration, to help us rebuild our schedules and adjust to life without athletics.
But when registration opened for Winter Quarter 2026, that promise slipped away. None of us had the priority we were promised by the athletic department. For some of my teammates, that could have been the difference between them staying on track with their major.
It took complaints from the whole team, alumni and parents for the problem to be fixed. We had to advocate for ourselves again. After everything we had already lost, it felt like one more example of being forgotten by the same institution we had represented with pride.
Having to remind the athletic department to give us the priority registration they had already guaranteed may have looked like a minor error to administrators, but for us it was another reminder that the university took away our sport, our structure and our sense of community.
Even now, it is hard not to feel a twinge of sadness when I walk past the pool or see the athletic facilities. The memories remain, from the encouragement at practices to the team dinners and shared laughter, but they sit alongside the constant reminder of how much has changed.