I walk through the metal gate, Nike bag over my shoulder. I immediately smell the chlorine and it gets my adrenaline pumping. I’m glad I decided to be part of the dive team again. I don’t have much time in my schedule, but it’s so worth it. I prance up to the pool, where the swim team is doing laps, and my coach, Eric Paterson, is watching two girls fall off the 1-meter springboard. Immediately, he gives me that look that says, ooh, I wish you hadn’t shown up. My face and my bag drop to the wet pavement.

The head of the swim and dive department, Coach Fegan, along with Coach Paterson, had been coercing me to be part of the dive team since I stepped foot on Mesa College. I finally joined last season and made it to State Championships, placing top 10. I thought they’d be begging to have me back again. I was wrong.

I am not a feminist. I am not an active member of the Women’s Liberation Movement. But I am convinced that female athletes do not matter as much as male athletes at Mesa College.

The women’s dive team at Mesa was discontinued. It was too expensive. It was a liability. It was. inconvenient. Women’s sports are often inconvenient.

The San Diego Community College District did not received state funding from June until September of this year. The school cut the dive team and kept football.

Funding that one sport for women is a mere fraction compared to the money that the district throws at the all-male football team.

Mesa College boasts its equality in sports claiming on its Web site that the school offers “20 intercollegiate sports, ten women’s and ten men’s sports.” That is interesting, especially because diving is still listed as a sport, I am still on the roster, and yet I was told it was cancelled half way through the last season.

This summer at the Beijing Olympics the U.S. dive team left without a single medal. At Athens in 2004 the dive team was also shut out of the standings, the first time that had happened in the sport in 92 years. That motivates me to represent women in the sport, to hold my head high and fight.

Federal legislation passed in 1972, known as Title IX, prohibits sex discrimination at schools that receive federal money, simultaneously attempting to expand women’s athletics.

In April 2007 the women’s basketball coaches at Mesa, Lorri Sulpizio and Cathy Bass, claimed they were fired after pointing out the obvious Title IX violations on campus. They also alleged discrimination based on their gender and sexual orientation. They happen to be lesbians, with three kids.

The federal Office of Civil Rights (OCR) conducted an investigation this year. In a Sept. 8 report, OCR found many discrepancies, the biggest of which was kicking women basketball players out of their own locker rooms in order to host a visiting football team. According to The National Center for Lesbian Rights, Mesa’s Athletic Director, Dave Evans, informed the women they could change in the public restrooms. The OCR also cited Mesa for gender discrimination involving scheduling of games, provision of locker rooms, facilities, and medical services. The OCR report stated that the violations were “substantial and unjustified.”

Sulpizio and Bass are filing a claim of their own on the grounds that they were unlawfully fired. They are suing Mesa Athletic Director Dave Evans, San Diego Mesa College, and the San Diego Community College District, claiming to having been unlawfully fired. Their court case is still pending

Mesa College does not appear to be supporting their female student athletes or staff. Are women really that much of a financial burden? Are women a blemish on the male dominated football field? Perhaps it is simply an innocent matter of the need for each sex to fulfill their gender roles. Women should look pretty, men should be athletic.

One fifth of the staff in the San Diego Community College District has alleged being victimized by occasional or frequent discrimination because of race or gender, according to a 1995 ERIC study.

San Diego State University certainly is no different. The Aztecs’ former swim and dive coach, Deena Deardurff Schmidt, received a 1.45 million dollar settlement in September after winning her Title IX lawsuit against the school. She filed this suit in Nov. of last year alleging “mistreatment at the school, unequal and inadequate facilities, pay, practice times, and [lack of] administrative support,” according the San Diego Union- Tribune writer Brent Schrotenboer. In 2000 SDSU closed its on-campus pool forcing the team to train elsewhere. She fought to have a new pool built, and it paid off, when one was completed in March 2007. Unfortunately for Schmidt, she was let go three months later despite her having tenure and having been an Olympic gold medalist in 1972.

Schmidt’s long- time assistant on campus, Greg Hutt, told the Union-Tribune, “I have never in my life seen one human being, as an employee and wonderful person, treated as disrespectfully as Deena has.”

Cases like these have sprouted up across Southern California and all over the country. Katie Hnida was the only female on the University of Colorado football team as a place-kicker in 1999. She broke barriers in sexism by being the first female to score points in Division I football. She was also raped by a teammate while watching TV.

Sports sociologist Richard Lapchick estimates that one out of every seven women is sexually assaulted on college campuses. Look around your 35-student classroom. Assuming half are women, chances are at least two women in your class have been violated here at Mesa.

Yet Danica Patrick, the Indy-car racer, sells herself on the Internet. You can find a photo of her from FHM magazine, sitting on the front bumper of a classic car, hood open, in a tiny red bikini and shiny boots, legs open to the gawking eyes, with a tough-girl expression.

Patrick could have made a better choice. She admitted doing the photo spreads, such as her topless shot in Sports Illustrated, so advertisers would sponsor her. Now that she got what she wanted, she refuses to do scantily clad ads, but you still see that seductive gleam in her eyes even while fully clothed in her GoDaddy.com promo photos.

Women’s athletics still only receives five percent of the media time. Therefore, women are encouraged to be media whores. And if we still are not getting noticed, we might even pose half-naked in a magazine spread. The audience may not be admiring our athleticism, but they will be admiring something.

Mets Radio broadcaster Keith Hernandez saw a woman, Kelly Calabrese, who was part of the Padres training staff, in the San Diego dugout in 2006 and was flabbergasted. He made this clear over the airwaves, saying, “What’s going on here? I won’t say that women belong in the kitchen, but they don’t belong in the dugout.”

Then where, Mr. Hernandez, do we belong?

Mesa College has agreed to give the softball team a proper field come spring, as opposed to the all-grass soccer field they have been using. Mesa officials have agreed to let women stay in their locker rooms, regardless of what football team is visiting. Also, an additional physical trainer was hired in order to assure equal attention to both sexes.

I have not stopped diving once our team was cut. I did not stop diving after I received no recognition for placing top ten at the state level. I actually plan on diving again next season, with the new female head coach. I am also coaching a local high school team in 2009, to assure gender discrimination does not come into play. And if the football team wants to kick my athletes out of their locker room, we won’t be leaving.