By James Sutherland on SwimSwam
Cal Poly officially unveiled its new $45 million football operations center, the John Madden Football Center, last weekend, some 15 months after cutting its swimming and diving program. The facility, which is attached to the school’s existing football stadium, houses team offices, locker rooms, training and meeting spaces.
In March 2025, Cal Poly Athletics announced it was axing the swim and dive program due to “financial realities,” referencing both the implications of the House settlement and the fact that the program had been losing a reported $450,000 annually.
In the months following, a group of alumni came together to try and raise enough money to save the program, but the school, which initially didn’t seem interested in any effort to revive the teams, set a lofty benchmark that wasn’t ultimately reached. Cal Poly initially set a fundraising bar of $25 million, which was eventually lowered to $15 million. Though the mark was not reached, the school formally rejected $10 million raised by the group.
Don Oberhelman, Cal Poly’s longtime Athletics Director, announced his surprise retirement in early June 2025, shortly before the school rejected the $10 million in fundraising.
On Saturday, June 6, Cal Poly celebrated its new football center with a ribbon-cutting event, while on the same day, former members of the swim and dive teams gathered on pool deck for an unveiling of two new boards honoring athletes who earned All-American status while swimming for the Mustangs.
“We would have loved to be adding a few more names to this board for the 2025-26 season,” former coach Kim Carlson said during the event, according to SFGATE. “But I’m still hopeful that this is just a chapter in our swimming history at Cal Poly, and not the ending.”
Cal Poly Hall of Fame swimmer Glenn Perry was the one behind the new boards honoring Cal Poly’s All-Americans, but despite him raising the money ($4,000) to have them put up years ago, it took until now for the school to actually follow through, SFGATE reported.
When asked why it took so long, a Cal Poly spokesperson told SFGATE: “The project was delayed first by COVID-19 and then by some administrative changes in Athletics and the elimination of the swim-dive program before being completed this year.”
Perry felt that Oberhelman also played a factor in the delay, according to SFGATE. The former AD was in attendance for the ribbon-cutting at the football center on Saturday.
Cal Poly named its new football center after alumnus and legenday football coach and commentator John Madden, who attended the school from 1957 to 1959 as a two-sport athlete, playing football and baseball.
The school said the center was developed in partnership with the Madden family and “made possible through the generosity of donors and supporters” without offering a complete breakdown of the funding.
According to SFGATE, Cal Poly swimming alum and current professor Trevor Cardinal is spearheading a nonprofit created by a group of alumni to raise awareness and funds to try and save the swim and dive teams despite the failed efforts last year. He said the group has developed “a working relationship” with new athletic director Carter Henderson, and that $15 million is still the threshold required for the program to have a chance of coming back.
“The best way we can honor the names of the folks on that board is to simply make sure that they’re not the last to get [their names] on the walls of this aquatic center,” Cardinal told SFGATE.
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