ALUMNI SUPPORT: BILL AND CHERYL SWANSON

serving up success

NEW BEACH VOLLEYBALL COMPLEX IS ONE OF THE MANY PROJECTS CENG ALUMNUS IS SUPPORTING

After the Cal Poly Women’s Beach Volleyball Team recorded its best season ever in 2019, the university brought a little bit of the beach to campus.

Roughly 3,300 tons of it, actually.

The new beach volleyball complex, complete with palm trees and 6.6 million pounds of sand, was supported by donors — most notably, Bill and Cheryl Swanson.

Bill Swanson, currently chairman of the Cal Poly Foundation Board, is an industrial engineering graduate (1971), who went to work for Raytheon right out of Cal Poly, eventually serving as CEO from 2004 until 2014. Now retired, Swanson and his wife are major Cal Poly supporters, with gifts that include a $10 million donation to the golf program — the largest Cal Poly Athletics has ever received.

The Swansons are also supporting a new 2,400-squarefoot clubhouse for the golf teams at Dairy Creek Golf Course that includes a team lounge, hitting bays and coaches’ offices. They are offering major support for the new Center for Wine and Viticulture, and the couple has helped Bill Swanson’s former college with a $200,000 gift to establish the Systems Engineering Innovation Challenge Fund.

That fund, at the direction of the dean, challenges students to work on interdisciplinary teams to identify high impact issues with possible technological solutions.

“The challenge fund donation is an excellent example of a pay-it-forward gift because it will help students help others,” said College of Engineering Dean Amy S. Fleischer. “Not only do we appreciate the way the Swansons have supported our engineering students, we’re also proud that one of our graduates is having such an impact universitywide, and we can easily see that legacy every time we walk around the campus.”

The Mustang Beach Complex, supported by $3 million in total donations (and $1 million from the Swansons), features five regulation-sized NCAA beach volleyball courts, seating for up to 250 spectators, lights and a stateof-the-art LED scoreboard bearing the Swanson family name.

Since the program’s 2014 inception, the volleyball team has played all of its home matches in Pismo Beach, which is roughly 10 miles from campus.

The new facility is expected to help the team recruit top talent. The team already has built its reputation by hiring Olympic gold medalist Todd Rogers as its coach and by finishing the 2019 season ranked No. 8 in the nation. That team, which won its first Big West title with a 25-12 record, also earned its first trip to the NCAA tournament. n

DAY IN COURT Bill Swanson, industrial engineering alumnus and chairman of the Cal Poly Foundation Board, checks out the sand at the new Mustang Beach Volleyball Complex before the Center of Effort Volleyball Challenge in late February. Swanson, the lead donor for the project, watched the Mustangs defeat Top 10 teams Pepperdine and Loyola Marymount. The Mustangs were 8-2 this year before their season was cancelled due to the coronavirus.