Bear Blog: Can you give us an overview of Cal Intercollegiate Athletics as we head toward a new year?
Sandy Barbour: We are at a really exciting juncture in our history with California Memorial Stadium having been renovated and the long-discussed upgrade of our facilities with the Simpson Center coming online. Those are huge advances for us and huge advances in our ability to provide a high-quality experience for our student-athletes, which is ultimately the goal. Within those projects, it gives us several multi-faceted opportunities to connect with our community, whether it be through our football gameday experience or through those facilities providing opportunities for our campus and our broader community to hold an event in Memorial Stadium.
The stadium project has been something that has weighed heavily during the entire duration of my eight years here. It was such a massive project, both from a financial standpoint but also the actual construction of the project itself and all of the approvals and all of the discussion here on campus. Getting that done took a Herculean effort by every member of this department and frankly every member of this campus. It also took up a huge part of our time. Getting that done really gives us an opportunity to move on to smaller yet still very important, but much more manageable projects and initiatives to continue to move us forward -- whether they be smaller capital projects for different sports which we certainly still have needs there, and certainly all kinds of other resource acquisitions or resource allotment throughout our 29 programs and throughout the department.
Are we financially challenged? Absolutely. I don't know there will ever be a time at the University of California, Berkeley that we'll feel like unequivocally we have everything we need from a resource standpoint. That's OK. One of the things I love about us is that we're resourceful, we're creative, we're clever - we're just like our student-athletes. We don't necessarily need all of the things that everybody else has because frankly we have some things nobody else has. We have the greatness of this campus. I know our coaches and certainly we administrators feel so fortunate that when we recruit, we have the reputation of this university to draw prospective student-athletes or prospective staff or coaches. Nobody else has that. We need to use that as our point of difference, and we do. Whether it's fundraising or recruiting or sales and service, we absolutely use that to our advantage.
I'm very proud of this department for the way in which we use our resources very effectively, very efficiently. We always need to be very diligent about that. We can't take our eye off that ball. But we're at a point where we are as competitive as we've ever been, we have an opportunity to vastly improve our financial situation through investing in revenue generating units, whether they be development or sales and service or just looking at different ways that we can produce revenue. That's no different than any other athletic department across the country.
We will certainly miss (outgoing chancellor) Bob Birgeneau - he's been a true champion for Intercollegiate Athletics. He's somebody that understands the value that high-quality, highly successful Intercollegiate Athletics programs can bring to a campus and he's promoted that every step of the way. I also believe in and trust the university and the process and everything that I've heard about (incoming chancellor) Nicholas Dirks is that he will be that and more, that he too will understand and embrace the value that we can bring and the role that we can serve in the greater excellence of the campus.
Because we're a great university, because we hire great people, we have the opportunity to go out and recruit the very best and the brightest young men and women to populate our 29 programs. I get great satisfaction and great joy out of watching them compete and practice and train and struggle and everything else, and watching them excel and then watching them graduate and then watching them come back five years later and talk about what they are doing.
It's a great labor of love. We have our challenges. We have things we have to improve and get right, but there are also a lot of things we do very, very well that we need to make sure that we continue to do well. I think great success is ahead of us.
I'm excited about Sonny Dykes' leadership in our football program. We have the best coaching staff in America across the board. You look at the number of National Coach of the Year honors that we've won, you look at what our teams are doing under these coaches' leadership -- every day, we want to make sure that we make our campus and our alums proud. I think we're doing that in a big way.
BB: What are your reflections on the football coaching search?
SB: High-profile coaching searches nowadays are very interesting. This is not your father's coaching search. You really have to be very diligent and hold it close to the vest because frankly if you are going after a certain level of coach that has had success as a head coach, they may not want their name out there. Frankly, there are two, if not three, coaches in our search that I'm not sure I ever saw their name. I just believe that's how it's done. That takes a lot of care and a lot of diligence and a lot of focus. The most fantastic thing about this search was the high level of interest from across the country from some names of people that were interested and really would turn some heads.
The first order of business is to establish a particular football competence, relative to the x's and o's and relative to the management of the football operation. You can do that pretty quickly. Then it's a matter of fit.
We ended up in New York at the National Football Foundation Hall of Fame Induction. We met with a bunch of candidates. There was a high, high level of interest in Cal and high level of interest in our student-athletes and the talent that is in this program and the success that we did have under Jeff Tedford's leadership. I will tell you there were multiple number of guys that I met face to face that I would have been happy to have lead our program, but Sonny was head and shoulders the best of that group. I knew it the first time I met with him. We established his football competence. I really, really like his values, like the way he talks about what he is about and what his job is as a head football coach. I love the way he talks about student-athletes and what his obligation is to them. I love the way he talks about his staff and how to put them together. I think he's a great fit. He showed extreme enthusiasm for the Pac-12 and for Berkeley and living in this area and how it was a great fit for his family.
BB: Is fit even more important at a unique place like Cal?
SB: I think fit is very important, no matter where you are. But I think fit becomes even more important at a place like Cal because we are so unique. Frankly, fit is really about values. Like all of us, he and his new staff are going to struggle a little bit with how to get things done around here. Unless you've spent some time here, and sometimes even when you have spent some time here, you don't' necessarily have it figured out how to get things done. But the fit is about values. You have to learn the mechanics of how to get things done, but there's a certain values perspective that it all starts with.
BB: From a game day and operations standpoint, how did the first season in the new California Memorial Stadium go?
SB: There are few things in life that truly exceed expectations. Both the Simpson Center and California Memorial Stadium and the two separate projects together and the environment that they have created on that part of campus, I think is a true asset to the campus, it's a true jewel that we will use as the cornerstone of our Intercollegiate Athletics program. It speaks to all of the things that we talk about in terms of athletics being valuable and powerful on our campus. It is a safe, comfortable, inviting place for our alumni, our fans, our students, our parents, our faculty, our staff to gather as a 60-plus thousand-person community on a given Saturday afternoon.
The UCLA game, the first-ever game under permanent lights , was electric. It was the University of California, Berkeley community gathering and celebrating all that we are and the stadium and the way it's configured allowed us to do that.
Probably the greatest thing that has made me feel really good about the project - and there have been a number of them - but the one that I would have to single out is a number of our football alumni made comments that they were afraid that by modernizing the stadium that we wouldn't maintain that Memorial Stadium, but it's here. That was very conscious. That feels good. We were able to combine the old and the new, to maintain tradition and pay homage to our history which is so important to us. At the same time, we can create today's history.
We have work to do. The East side is not done. We took a 30-month project and jammed it into 21 months. It is a miracle that we played a football game on Sept. 1. It's a great tribute to Webcor and our capital projects folks and the architects and construction management and all the trades and the subs -- you name it, just phenomenal work. But the fact is we had thousands and thousands of square footage turned over to us three days before the first event. The construction was done. The building was there. We just had no time to learn how to operate it. We spent an entire season learning and we will continue to. Having said that, our staff did an absolutely phenomenal job in presenting Memorial Stadium to our fans. It's a beautiful jewel that we need to take care of, one that will be a launching pad for a lot of things that Intercollegiate Athletics at Cal will do that will help us advance from a revenue production standpoint, that will help us advance from a brand standpoint, will help us advance from a student-athlete experience standpoint. All of that will help put us in good stead to help us accomplish all of our priorities.
BB: Were there times during the season when you reflected on the journey it took to finally get this project done?
SB: When they turned the stadium over to us on that Wednesday
before the first game, I actually went down on the field and just stood in the
Cal script and looked up and looked around, particularly at the press box and
the premium seating area - that's oh so very different than what we had. You
think about all the student-athletes that came before and played through and
endured less-than-desirable circumstances. You think about all the fans, all
the alumni, all the committed season-ticket holders that sat through a lot of games
on splintering-wooden benches.
BB: What were your thoughts on a pretty high-profile Signing Day at Cal last month?
SB: This is the advantage of having such an incredible university to recruit to and having coaches that have the reputations that they do. In terms of signings, Missy Franklin is clearly the one that has the biggest name. I'm excited about Missy bringing her talents to Berkeley. I'm also excited about retroactively adding her medals to our medal count. Missy is probably the brightest star in a menu of really great recruits across the board. Missy was the top catch in women's swimming. Ryan Murphy was probably the No. 1 ranked men's swimmer. I know everybody is excited about Jabari Bird in men's basketball and Courtney Range and KC Waters in women's basketball and Rich (Feller) signed another great recruiting class in volleyball, including Steve Kerr's daughter, Maddy Kerr. This university and this department continues to attract the very best out there. In an Olympic year, when you have somebody like Missy Franklin shine for the United States, to have her make the decision to bring those talents to Cal is very validating for Teri and our women's swimming program and this department and for the campus. But I'm looking forward to having all those we signed in November and will sign in February and will sign in April that will be freshmen and starting out their careers at Cal, and that's always fun. To see them come in as freshmen, and four or five years later see them leave with their degrees and maybe a few national championships and a whole lot of experiences and memories, that's really what we are all about.
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