Golden Nuggets: Golden Bear Report Interviews Knowlton, Alex Morgan and Miranda Nild Meet

Football

• Golden Bear Report finishes off the season previews for Oregon State, Washington State, USC, Stanford, and UCLA.
• Trace Travers interviewed Jim Knowlton as we recently passed one year with our new Athletic Director. There’s some pretty good questions and revealing answers, notably on the subject of new facilities for Softball, Beach Volleyball, and Men’s Basketball.

What do you think are some of those unique successes so far?

We’ve worked hard on our budget, the chancellor and I and the provost are all now in agreement on what the budget should look like for the next five years. That’s huge, because we feel that’s been a point of contention for years and years and years, and we’re now at a point where we’ve got a plan for the five years and it’s going to help us reduce institutional support required each year, which will be really good for us and the campus.

I feel we’re really making some strides in the gender equity area, really developing a plan that’s helping us embrace gender equity and to be able to go to our student athletes and say we’re doing a good job balancing the needs of all of our student. We’ve been very student athlete focused with the Cameron Institute that we’ve just begun to put together is really going to be focused on student athletes from a career development, community engagement, and leadership development, personal development perspective. That’s going to be really big for us.

Academically, we had a really good year. Seven of our teams had a perfect 1000 APR, which ties our record for all-time, and 15 of our sports had their highest ever APR, so we’re like, ‘wow, we’re on a good path with the academics and the APR,’ we had over a 3.0 average for our 30 teams, which is really exciting.

• This edition of the GBR mailbag answers questions about the Cal offense among many other things.
• GBR’s daily free articles counting down the 100 days till the season starts is really giving me a lot of material! Here is their article on McCallan Castles.
• A non-GBR article! Jon Wilner speculates on a wild scenario, could the Pac-12 play some 9 AM home games to replace some of those dreaded 7:30PM games?

Misc.

• Later today, Alex Morgan and Team USA will play Miranda Nild and Team Thailand in the Women’s World Cup (Noon on FOX). Morgan confirmed in a press conference that she has introduced herself to Nild and they are friendly. (It is mentioned in one paragraph and the rest of the article is about other stuff)
• Ella Annest of women’s lacrosse interns at a cancer clinic, the same one where she used to be a patient.

Aller les Ours!