By Jonathan Okanes, Cal Athletic Communications
BERKELEY – Last week at the corner of Bancroft Way and Fulton Street, UC Berkeley broke ground on a state-of-the-art facility that will benefit both Cal’s world-class aquatics programs as well as the entire campus.
The California Aquatic Center will be a 52-meter training pool with a bulkhead & diving tower, locker rooms and team room. It will serve as a practice facility for Cal’s men’s and women’s swimming teams as well as its men’s and women’s water polo teams. By moving the training sessions to the new center, Rec Sports will be able to offer more pool time to the general campus at Spieker Aquatics Complex.
“We are committed to excellence in everything we do, and to make that excellence a reality for everyone that is part of the university,” UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said. “I see that in the process of coming to this groundbreaking. I see it in the project that we are about to begin – another facility that is going to make it possible for us to show to campus and to the world how important the aquatic programs are.
“Our aquatic athletes are models for our university. They are models for our athletic programs. They are models for all of us.”
All four of Cal’s aquatics programs have shared Spieker Aquatics Complex since 1996, when the university added women’s water polo as an intercollegiate sport. The programs have worked together to juggle training times and competitions, as well as times available to the campus. The California Aquatic Center will alleviate some of the obstacles coaches and student-athletes face in securing the pool time necessary for proper training.
“Being able to have another body of water that we can expand on is equivalent to a scientist having another lab,” Cal women’s swim coach Teri McKeever said. “We’re going to have another facility that we can continue to be creative – that will allow these student-athletes to fully take part in the campus itself. We’ll be able to have a little more flexibility. They’ll be able to enjoy greater flexibility in their academic schedules, in their rest and recovery schedules and in their social schedules.”
Cal’s aquatics programs have achieved unprecedented success. The women’s swim team won the 2015 NCAA championship, its fourth national crown in the past seven years. The men’s swim team has won three of the past five NCAA titles. Cal’s men’s water polo team has won 13 national championships, and along with the women’s water polo team, is a perennial top-5 program nationally.
The programs have also produced individual student-athletes that have excelled at the highest level. Indeed, at last week’s groundbreaking, former Cal aquatics student-athletes in attendance represented over 25 Olympic medals spanning five Olympic Games.
Included among the crowd were Olympic swimmers Natalie Coughlin, Nathan Adrian, Anthony Ervin, Tom Shields, Caitlin Leverenz, Ryan Murphy and Rachel Bootsma, as well as four-time Olympic women’s water polo player Heather Petri.
“Our aquatics programs are always doing so well and pushing the bar higher and higher,” Leverenz said. “This is just something else to keep pushing the bar up.”
The California Aquatic Center, which is being 100 percent funded by private donors, is scheduled to be completed next summer. It will allow Spieker Aquatics Center to provide 19.5 more hours per week for campus use, a 36 percent increase.
“This is a classroom that’s benefitting the world, that’s benefitting this campus,” McKeever said.
