The Cal Bears football team, still awaiting approval of new facilities, focuses on fixing team unity after last year's promising start and eventual collapse.
By Bud Withers
We interrupt your morning Cheerios with this visual (Warning: You might want to put down the spoon for a few seconds). Zack Follett, a California linebacker who is one of the Pac-10's best, recalls a scene from earlier this summer. The Bears' weight room looks out on the oaks surrounding Memorial Stadium, where Berkeley "tree people" have been lodged for almost two years to protest a major facilities renovation.
As Follett tells it, attempts were made with boom trucks to remove the protesters, ruled by a court injunction to present a safety and health hazard. But the protesters, he says, had been "saving up in glass jars" human waste. "They were chucking bombs," Follett said recently of the tree-sitters. "It was pretty exciting." You can't really tell the story of Cal football, 2008, without the background of its proposed facilities project, just as you can't tell the story of this year's Bears without looking at 2007's.
First, the proposed improvements. Cal has sought to build the 142,000-square-foot Student Athlete High Performance Center next to Memorial Stadium — training center, locker rooms, meeting rooms, offices, for football and 12 other sports — against the tri-fold wishes of the city of Berkeley (fighting it over earthquake concerns), the Panorama Area residents and the California Oak Foundation. The whole thing doesn't really hit home until, arriving for a football game, you see the planks and tarps — home to the oak folks — above you. It has been a seemingly unending saga, with clauses in Cal coach Jeff Tedford's contract tied to the construction. When Tedford spoke at Pac-10 media day July 24, he was cheered by the recent lifting of an injunction in Alameda County that has prevented construction since early 2007.
But that resolution has been clouded by an appellate court ruling that the decision was incomplete and kicked it back to the same court. A new ruling is due next week. “We've been hearing the same thing the past two years," said Follett, a senior. "We're really not caught up into it until they start cutting the first tree. "When I was a freshman, they promised [the improvements] were going to be here, and they promised it last camp [in 2007]. I'm never going to see it." The facility is seen as pivotal to a continued uptick in Cal football under Tedford. Late last September, meanwhile, the Bears seemed poised to punctuate that rise, facilities or no facilities.
They won dramatically at Oregon to complete a 5-0 start and looked to have a strong chance to play for a national championship. Then came a most rancid finish, as the Bears lost six of their last seven regular-season games and managed to overcome Air Force in the Armed Forces Bowl only after an injury to Falcons quarterback Shaun Carney. It was symptomatic when receivers DeSean Jackson and Robert Jordan and safety Thomas DeCoud didn't start the bowl game because of team rules violations. "I don't think the reason we lost was because we got 'out-strengthed' and teams were better," said Follett, referring to the slide. "I felt it was more internal. I think we had too many individuals on the team last year." Tedford, an offensive mind who has had varying degrees of involvement with that side, has relinquished play-calling to new coordinator Frank Cignetti, whose last job was tutoring Alex Smith as San Francisco 49ers quarterbacks coach. "I felt I needed to go back to the other role," said Tedford, referring to the more generalized head-coaching description. "It's hard to feel the pulse when you're 100 percent into the game."
"Tedford would only talk with the offense," says Follett, adding, "The biggest thing I'm trying to do is get the guys to talk to each other more. You'd see guys walk by on campus [last year], and they wouldn't even talk to each other. That's how our team was." Tedford spent much of the offseason repairing chemistry. He leaned on the book "Talent is Never Enough" by leadership guru John C. Maxwell and had coaches discuss chapters of it in front of the entire team. "It was kind of a competition thing," Follett said. "The last thing the team wants is to meet every Tuesday and Thursday to go over some book report, but I was looking at the players' faces, and everyone was intrigued. You could tell it in their eyes." Follett's linebacker group, including O'Dea High grad Anthony Felder and Worrell Williams, looms as the strongest unit on the team as the Bears move to a 3-4 defense. But the most-watched position will be quarterback, where a decision is imminent on who starts, senior Nate Longshore or sophomore Kevin Riley. "It may take both of them for us to achieve our goals this year," Tedford said. Those are the goals beneath the oak trees, of course.
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