SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — What they were told would never happen is now reality.
High school swimmers in San Diego, who committed to continue their careers at Cal Poly, are now treading water after the college abruptly cut its swim program last Friday.
Chloe Quarles, a senior at Coronado High School, turned down offers from five other schools to be a Mustang.
"I was really excited, obviously, to compete at a higher level," she said. "The community there seems great."
Kale Lozano, a senior at Torrey Pines High School, said he specifically reached out to the program with the hopes of being recruited. That's exactly what happened, allowing him to continue pursuing his biggest passion.
“It’s really everything to me," he said. "It’s pretty much defined my life.”
The program is coming off a historic season. The men's team went undefeated in dual meets, and Coach Kim Carlson won Big West Men's Swimming Coach of the Year.
Last Friday, any momentum building for the future was wiped away. Cal Poly athletics cut the program.
"At first I was, like, there's no way this is real," Lozano said. "So, then I looked on their school website and, you know, the first article posted was Cal Poly swim and dive team shut down effective immediately.”
The article followed a meeting in the morning, during which the men and women’s swim and dive programs were notified of the reality by Cal Poly Athletic Director Don Oberhelman.
Quarles added, "I kind of just sat there in silence because I didn't really know how to react. Eventually it came with tears, but — first I just didn't really know what to say because we had been promised so many times that the team wouldn't be cut."
In fact, Oberhelman told ABC 10News' sister station KSBY in October that cutting any sports program was a last resort.
"It is probably one of the worst things an athletic department can go through is the elimination of the sport," he said. "It's the last thing we'd want.”
The swim and dive program is the only sports program at the school to be shut down. In the announcement, Cal Poly President Jeffrey Armstrong said, 'At this time, no other Cal Poly sports programs are at risk of being discontinued."
Armstrong said the decision was "unavoidable," citing financial challenges following a settlement in The House vs. NCAA, a landmark lawsuit establishing backpay to student-athletes over their NIL rights, or name, image and likeness.
Armstrong said it would result in a loss of at least $450,000 per year for their programs.
For Quarles and Lozano, it means a potential loss of their dreams.
“I could still go to school there, and some of us have talked about that, but really, the dream is to swim," Quarles said. "It would suck for all my hard work that I put in, for all the past 13, 14 years of my life that I've done, to go to waste because of a cut that I couldn't control.”
Before they consider any other path, they first want to try and save the program.
A GoFundMe has been created, with the goal of raising $200,000. There's also a petition in circulation that's gathered close to 20,000 signatures so far.
However, even those might all be for nothing.
"This is to show the athletic director that we can fund ourselves, even though he said, you know, he doesn't want us to self fund," Lozano said.
ABC 10News learned Cal Poly's team captains plan to meet with Armstrong later this week, and in a dream world, doing so with their fundraising goal met.
How far that'll go to saving the program, if at all, remains to be seen.
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