How Football Ended at University of the Pacific
When the football stadium was commemorated as the Pacific Memorial Stadium in the 1950’s the future for the football program was bright. The team appeared to be winning and University of the Pacific had a beautiful stadium. However it wasn’t long before the team began losing both games and revenue. Stockton had always had lofty dreams of being the center of Northern and Central Valley California football, and for a while they were. However, as the years went by the team began losing more games and failing to recruit better players and coaches. After the 1950s the battle over whether to fund the program began, with many students, faculty, and local Stocktonians on both sides of the argument.
According to a 1961 Pacific Weekly article University of the Pacific had made a decision in 1960 to “de-emphasize” the football program because as President Burns said, “it was impossible for football to remain upon our campus without plunging the Student Body deeper into the red.”
In 1995 the Board of Regents was once again called to make a decision about the University of the Pacific football team. According to The Pacific article the school was in a budget crisis and the football team had been experiencing over $400,000 in shortfall, which the board of regents had donated personally. However, the death of longtime regent Bob Eberhardt would make this funding even more difficult particularly because Bob Eberhardt had been such a big donor to the $400,00. The Board of Regents ultimately went against the special committee’s recommendation to end the football program. They reasoned that the university was set to choose a new president and that the new president might be able to turn the tide on University of the Pacific’s debt, therefore saving the football program.
In September of 1996, President DeRosa commented on the budget cutbacks and the fact that the University of the Pacific had recently had a drop in enrollment most likely due to the suspension of the football team. President DeRosa worked hard to guide the college out of deep debt and one of the many sacrifices he made as a brand new president was the suspension of the costly football program. When the program was cut many were optimistic that it was temporary and would return when the university was in a better financial situation but this change turned out to be permanent.
Acknowledgments:
We would like to thank our source archives, the Holt-Atherton Special Collections at the University of the Pacific for permission to use their metadata, digital archives, and archival expertise. We would like to specifically thank Nicole Montjoy-Grady and Mike Wurtz for their support and willingness to share their collections.