Sunday Extra

Discrimination indifferent to different sports

Softball player, basketball player and swimmer share similar stories.

By ANTONYA ENGLISH
Published July 18, 2004

Andrea Zimbardi has traveled the country for the past year making speaking engagements in which she tells college administrators, coaches and anybody else who will listen what it feels like to be discriminated against because of your sexual orientation.

During that time the former University of Florida softball player has met many other gay and lesbian athletes who share similar experiences.

"Some of the stories they tell me are heartbreaking," said Zimbardi, who graduated from Florida in May with an engineering degree and currently lives in Pinellas County. "I've cried at every single conference."

Zimbardi is the first athlete to file a discrimination complaint against a major Division I university based on sexual orientation, prompting Florida to change its policies, including adding sexual orientation to its anti-discrimination policy. It is a change Zimbardi believes will make a significant difference for future athletes, but she knows it is just a start.

"We have progressed over the past few decades, but it's still shocking to see that it hasn't been much progression," she said."

Lauren Ruffin, a former basketball player at Mount Holyoke College, in South Hadley, Mass., is one of the athletes Zimbardi has met during the past year. At the end of Ruffin's junior year in 2002, she decided to work the college basketball camp circuit for the summer, a job that sent her to "one of the best Division I programs in the country." There, she experienced homophobia first hand.

"There was a point where we're playing pickup games after camp is over and the team is so good, they have male practice players," said Ruffin, now 22 and working in Baltimore. "So when one of the guys gets his shot blocked, they call him a faggot. And this wasn't just the players, but the coaches that were hanging around, too. It was the first time I had been around where someone said you're a faggot in a way that it was such a derogatory term. It was said to make the guys play harder and to make him feel like he's getting his a- kicked by a girl."

Ruffin also recalls two girls being sent home from the camp by the team's coaching staff because of a rumor they were lesbians who possibly were dating.

"Players (on the team) were making fun of the girls and saying, "Oh I hear that's your girlfriend over there. Are you a lesbian?' I've played sports since I was 5 years old, and I was blown away by what happened there."

California swimmer Enrique Flores, who graduated from UC-Irvine this past spring, came out of the closet when he was a freshman and was welcomed by his teammates, but other athletes at the school struggled with it.

"In sports where there are a lot of guys involved, it's different," he said. "We had some basketball players that found out about me, and they were weirded out about it. They were really uncomfortable with having a gay guy in the locker room or sharing a locker next to them."

In high school Flores feared having the truth revealed about his sexual orientation. Lynwood, Calif., where he grew up, wasn't very tolerant, he said. And he knew parents on his club swim team wouldn't approve. When one athlete in his high school came out, "he was just teased every day from then on and it was bad," Flores said.

So he did what he knew he had to: conform. He took girls to the prom and joined in all of the macho things male athletes do.

But by the time he got to college, he felt he had no choice.

"I really got tired of keeping it in for so long," he said. "It was just a liberation for me. (Hiding) is a really hard thing to do.

"People have to be allowed to be who they are."

[Last modified July 17, 2004, 23:37:26]