If you ever set foot on the UC Berkeley campus, there are a few things that you simply cannot miss by virtue of their size: The Big C, Sather Tower, Evans Hall, just to name a few. But perhaps the biggest structure on campus is the massive Memorial Stadium, which sits over 60,000 people. Since the time when I was a student at UC Berkeley, the stadium has undergone a massive renovation, but it’s not just for vanity’s sake. Memorial Stadium sits on the Hayward fault line, and the renovation was necessary to make the building more seismically sound.
We were really fortunate to be given a behind-the-scenes tour of Memorial Stadium by Assistant Athletic Director, Dave Kao. He was kind enough to bring us down to the field, which is normally only accessible to the student athletes and other staff. Unfortunately, the field was being re-turfed on the day of our visit because there was going to be a new sponsor for the field, so they had to change all the existing logos. Good thing we could still see the Big, Blue C painted on the benches:
Next, from all the way down on the ground, we were taken all the way up to the private boxes. The view from there is nothing short of magnificent, as the stadium is built on one of the highest points on campus, and is a very tall structure itself. It was a clear spring day when we visited, and you could see out from the balcony all the way across the bay to the city of San Francisco:
Berkeley has a rich sporting history, with their athletes winning many college titles and many representing the nation in the Olympics (and winning gold) as well. For all these athletes, there is a training gym just for student athletes within Memorial Stadium, and we were allowed to take a quick look and walkthrough:
One interesting nugget of information that Dave shared with us, and which was particularly exciting to this group of students who loved basketball: when Kobe Bryant used to play for the Los Angeles Lakers, he would book out the entire gym the night before a match against the Warriors so that he could train with his personal trainer.
Of course, now that we have viewed the home of Cal athletes, we had to go watch a college game, and that’s what we did. We caught a college baseball game the very next day, and it was a good one too, with UC Berkeley emerging victorious!