Pleased to announce that today California Legends is launching three separate fundraising drives for football, MBB and WBB. We are doing this to celebrate our new Chancellor and prove once and for all that Cal fans are hungry to see our athletic success match our academic excellence.

Couple of notes. We are doing this initially without a matching component although we may add one of those if someone feels inspired. We have the tracker toggled off at launch but will get that active in a few days so people can see how close we are getting to our goal.


Here's the verbiage and link for football:

Please join the California Legends Collective in our fundraising drive to celebrate the appointment of Rich Lyons as the next Chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. To have a lifelong Cal fan who was in Memorial Stadium for The Play is a dream come true. We couldn't be more thrilled.

To celebrate, we wish to raise an additional $1m between today and May 1st to create additional NIL opportunities for our football student-athletes, both those currently on the team and those who will hopefully join us during this crucial transfer portal window. Help Chancellor Lyons and Cal to take the ACC by storm. Give today!

[url=http://spot.fund/CALegendsFootball][/url]http://spot.fund/CALegendsFootball

Link for MBB ($500k additional goal)

[url=http://spot.fund/CALegendsMensBasketball][/url]http://spot.fund/CALegendsMensBasketball

For WBB ($250k additional goal)

[url=http://spot.fund/CALegendsWomensBasketball][/url]http://spot.fund/CALegendsWomensBasketball


Donate today. Go Bears!

bump

Contribute below!
Football ($1m goal): https://t.co/vnAVxG5L3g
MBasketball ($500k goal): https://t.co/1qzoRvZVcm
WBasketball ($250k goal): https://t.co/5cbReQ9NHi

— California Legends (@ca_legends_) April 12, 2024

Go Bears!

Exciting update to our "Lyons and Transfers and Bears, Oh My!" Fundraiser. Thrilled to report that two of our truest and bluest Golden Bears have provided anchor gifts to push these funds along and get us a long way toward our goal. Randy Scott has given us $100k to our MBB fund and Lance Cooper has given $500k to our football fund! Amazing! This is on top of all the incredible gifts they both gave last year and in 2022. Lance in particular has really carried our collective and I shudder to think where we would be without him. A million thanks to both Randy and Lance for their generosity and steadfast support.

With these bedrock gifts I have flipped those two drives live so people can now see their gifts reflected in real time (and how close we are getting to our goal). I still need to receive a similar gift for WBB, but I know both we and Coach Smith are working hard to find it.

Would love if some of you could match or (be still my heart) exceed Lance and Randy's generosity. But all contributions are welcome and needed regardless of amount. With your support we can make Cal a contender and we can do it immediately, I truly believe that. Today we took a big step in that direction.

Go Bears!

Those are two very kind and inspiring large donations.

Just made my donation, Go Bears!

I won't type it all up again here since this is the football forum, but a $250k challenge grant was just added for men's basketball to our fundraising drive. If this goes well I would like to see if I can find someone to step up in a similar fashion for football.

If you want to read about it, check here. A lot of the same concepts apply.

https://bearinsider.com/forums/3/topics/120408

We are proud to support University of Memphis student-athletes with our new NIL program initiatives, giving us the opportunity to invest in bright, young talent in our great hometown of Memphis. #GTG 🐯 @TigersAthletics pic.twitter.com/URmT8itSQq

— FedEx (@FedEx) April 19, 2024

$25 MM (!)

While I appreciate Cal Legends being "grass roots", is it also trying to find corporate donors?

I donated $1000 today in memoriam of my dear friend Walt Harris, who passed away far too early and many years ago. Walt was a diehard Bears fan. Many of the old timers here remember him by his call signs "Big WJH" and "Ramtor." Walt would've loved what Greg and SebastaBear are doing to push Cal football and basketball to new and unprecedented heights of glory in this complex modern era of sports. RIP BigWJH.

Berzerker1 said:

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I donated $1000 today in memoriam of my dear friend Walt Harris, who passed away far too early and many years ago. Walt was a diehard Bears fan. Many of the old timers here remember him by his call signs "Big WJH" and "Ramtor." Walt would've loved what Greg and SebastaBear are doing to push Cal football and basketball to new and unprecedented heights of glory in this complex modern era of sports. RIP BigWJH.

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That's terrific. Thank you so much. I often think of all those who have gone to that big stadium in the sky and never had the opportunity to see Cal succeed at the highest levels during the modern era of college sports. It makes me sad that while the program muddled along they lost their chance, I'm determined not to be one of them myself. Want to take this shot while it's there to take.

Thank you!

Pleased to note we exceeded our fundraising goal for men's basketball and are tantalizingly close for football. This is thanks to some major gifts that we received in the last 24 hours. Most notably we received a $250,000 anonymous gift for football and a $250,000 anonymous gift for men's basketball. This came from the same individual. Bless you! I also put $100,000 in for football myself as payment for two slots at an NIL event that we are going to put on with some members of the football team in Italy this summer. Will post more on that in the next day or so, but there will be a few tickets for those who have the means and are looking for a once a lifetime opportunity. Once we came up with it I knew my son and I had to be there. Please don't tell my wife.

But this doesn't mean our NIL needs are met. To clarify, these were just fundraising drives with what I thought were achievable goals. We still need money in all three sports. Particularly in men's basketball where we have rung the bell hard. I think once the final recruiting rankings get sorted, this will be a top five class nationally in MBB. Simply amazing. But that was not inexpensive. So we continue to need donations above our goal and would appreciate whatever support people want to offer. Also we continue to need some people to make significant gifts to women's basketball. Appreciate those who have thrown in what they can, but we really need some needle moving gifts there.

Go Bears!

[url=http://spot.fund/CALegendsFootball][/url]http://spot.fund/CALegendsFootball


[url=http://spot.fund/CALegendsMensBasketball][/url]http://spot.fund/CALegendsMensBasketball

[url=http://spot.fund/CALegendsWomensBasketball][/url]http://spot.fund/CALegendsWomensBasketball

Thank you for spearheading this. And thank you for the updates, the honesty.