Dear Cal Family, 

We hope 2026 is off to a great start for you, as it is for your Golden Bears! With an impressive new group of football student-athletes and coaches, a number of Top 10 Olympic sport programs in action, a sold-out Haas Pavilion, a great men's basketball win over North Carolina, an exciting women's basketball victory over Notre Dame, and two thrilling hoops wins over Stanford, the momentum in Berkeley continues to build! 

As we reflect on the fall semester and look to the spring, we are proud to report some great progress and provide some insights into our areas of focus as we seek to create a successful, distinctive and financially sustainable Cal Athletics Department.  

Earlier this year, our leadership team developed what we call the "2025-26 Playbook – The Cal Advantage," where we identified our core values and what success looks like for us moving forward. As a result of our conversations, we created our thematic goal for the 2025-2026 year – To establish the framework for a sustainable financial model for the future of Cal Athletics, and take a big, measurable step toward financial sustainability. To achieve that goal, we established significant defining objectives that include investing in and supporting football and basketball, enhancing traditional revenue streams while creating new ones, focusing on philanthropy and alumni/donor relations, and enhancing the Cal Athletics brand both nationally and locally. 

This framework has guided our decision making throughout the year. Through generous support from the donor community and Chancellor Lyons, we've made investments in football, basketball and our revenue generating infrastructure, including a full distribution of the $20.5M revenue sharing pool, the merger of our development and revenue generating teams and the hiring of Jason Hobar from Nike as our Chief Marketing Officer. 

We are excited to report early indicators of success in each of these areas. In football, we had our best television viewership in over seven years, great successes in acquiring talent in the transfer portal, record fundraising for a fall term (Thank you all!), and an enhanced fan experience. The full 2026 schedule was released this week with an exciting seven-game home slate, and you can renew or purchase season tickets here. 

In basketball, the energy in Haas Pavilion in recent weeks has been electric! When we first joined the ACC, we talked about how exciting it would be to host storied programs like Duke and North Carolina in Haas Pavilion. As expected, the Cal family packed Haas to see these matchups and gave us a home court advantage, helping the men's team defeat the Tar Heels! A week later, our men's team took down Stanford in Maples Pavilion and our women's team knocked off the Cardinal in a thrilling overtime win in front of a raucous crowd at Haas! Don't miss our final month of home games, as you can secure your men's and women's tickets now.

We'd like to congratulate two legendary Golden Bears. First, congrats to Shellie Onstead, Donna Fong Director of Field Hockey, on her retirement. A proud alumna who bleeds blue and gold, Shellie devoted 31 years to leading this program and mentoring hundreds of student-athletes, assistant coaches, and colleagues throughout the department and the sport. She made a lasting impact here at Cal and she leaves behind an extraordinary legacy as she enters retirement. Lastly, congratulations to Jeff Kent on becoming the first Cal alumnus to be elected into the National Baseball Hall of Fame! Jeff was inducted into the Cal Athletics Hall of Fame in 2009 after earning All-Pac-10 honors and helping us advance to the College World Series in 1988. He then went on to become one of the best second basemen in major-league history. 

As we've said before, it will take support from the entire village for Cal Athletics to succeed in this new era of college sports. We've seen great enthusiasm and alignment internally and externally, and we're just getting started. We appreciate your continued support! 

Go Bears!

 
Jenny and Jay