Cal Family –

Greetings from Haas Pavilion!

We had another memorable commencement last month at California Memorial Stadium, and our student-athlete reception that followed was once again a huge hit. We had around 500 graduates and their friends and families in the University Club, and it is always so gratifying to hear their reflections about their time at Cal, and the impact it will have on the rest of their lives.

Commencement also serves as a benchmark of reflection, a chance to look back at what has been another memorable year in Cal Athletics. We have one more team still in action – eight of our track & field student-athletes close out the 2024-25 academic year at the NCAA Outdoor Championships next week in Eugene.  In the ongoing dynamic and challenging environment that the enterprise of intercollegiate athletics presents, it might be easy to forget or overlook the sheer brilliance that our student-athletes and teams continue to exhibit every day at Cal.

To name a few examples from 2024-25:

• Our football team went to a bowl game for the second straight year and retained The Axe for the fourth year in a row
• Not only did we host ESPN's "College Gameday" for the first time ever, analyst Kirk Herbstreit named Cal as the best Gameday scene of the season
• Our women's basketball team earned a berth in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in six years and swept Stanford for the first time since the 1985-86 season
• Our rugby team won the national championship, the program's 34^th title in our history
• Our men's swimming & diving team won the NCAA championship in the 800-yard freestyle relay
• Discus thrower Mykolas Alekna broke his own world record
• We won our first ACC championships in men's swimming & diving and women's gymnastics, and men's rowing won the first-ever MPSF title
• We sent a department-record 59 Olympians to Paris and tied our record by securing 23 medals

There was so much more, and we did all this while also leveraging increased national exposure in the ACC and recording our highest graduation success rate (GSR) in history (93%)!!!

The Cal Athletics Fund in partnership with Travers Family Head Football Coach Justin Wilcox, General Manager Ron Rivera and Kevin and Jeanette Kennedy, launched the Fight For California Football Challenge in which the Cal community came together and raised over $2.4M in support of Cal football! This extraordinary effort shattered UC Berkeley's crowdfunding records and will play a crucial role in supporting the program's quest to win championships!

We recently celebrated the groundbreaking for our softball facility renovation, which will deliver equitable facilities for current and future Golden Bears. It was a great morning filled with excitement and Cal pride as supporters came together to congratulate one another on this momentous project. We will also be celebrating the groundbreaking of our new beach volleyball facility later this month!

Our academic pursuits are in good hands as Tarik Glenn was recently named the executive director of our Athletic Study Center. Tarik is uniquely equipped to lead the ASC – not only was he a standout student-athlete for our football team in the 1990s who went on to play 10 years in the NFL, but he has worked at the Athletic Study Center since 2014 and served as the interim executive director since last June. Tarik is an innovative, solution-oriented thinker who will serve us well as we continue to navigate the changing times in intercollegiate athletics.

You may have seen that our Hall of Fame selection committee recently voted in the Class of 2025, and it's a star-studded cast! Legendary head football coach Jeff Tedford was elected, as was the star center that played for him – Alex Mack. Other incredible inductees were Layshia Clarendon (women's basketball), Hana Cutura (volleyball), Michael Weaver (men's golf), Donna Fong (field hockey coach), Ivan Rackov (men's water polo) and Damir Dugonjic (men's swimming & diving). The class will be honored – along with the Class of 2024 during Hall of Fame weekend - Oct. 17-18. Tables and sponsorships are now available for purchase here - single tickets will go on sale the first week of August. 

We now have kickoff times for six of our first eight football games this season, and we are excited about the atmosphere we will have at California Memorial Stadium! Our home opener is against Texas Southern on Sept. 6 and we then host Minnesota the following week in an ACC-Big Ten showdown. Our home game against North Carolina – which is part of Hall of Fame weekend – is on Oct. 17 at 7:30 p.m. Our staff is busy planning for another season of terrific fan experience at CMS!

We also now know our ACC opponents for men's basketball, and are thrilled to be hosting traditional powers Duke and North Carolina at Haas Pavilion next season! We also welcome two other 2025 NCAA Tournament teams to Berkeley – Clemson and Louisville. As usual, we will play Stanford both home and away. Coach Madsen and his staff have been hard at work building the team and preparing for their second season in the ACC, and I look forward to our Cal Family creating a great home-court advantage that the team can use as fuel against its opponents!

In closing, I could not be prouder of our entire athletic department village - our coaches, student-athletes, donors and alumni. Every one of you made this a truly special year, and helped remind us that the University of California, Berkeley provides a special opportunity for every single person that wins the golden ticket to come to Cal.

Go Bears!


 
 Jim