Cal Poly announces new athletic director

Author

Carly Heltzel
September 26, 2025

Good morning. It’s Friday, and I’m reading about Tony Hawk’s skateboard that just sold for $1.15 million. Onto the five Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and California stories you need to know for today.

1.

Cal Poly selected Carter Henderson as the new athletic director following the retirement of longtime athletic director Don Oberhelman. Henderson previously served as the deputy athletics director for external relations at Stanford University and will take over his role role on Oct. 13. “We will look at community, we will look at the classroom and we will look at competition,” Henderson said in his first remarks at a press conference yesterday. 

2.

If you’ve noticed new, upright robots rolling around campus, no, they are not a next generation meal delivery service. The new bots are mapping the campus for accessibility compliance, collecting data for Cal Poly’s Americans with Disabilities Act Transition Plan. An official from the robot’s company said they take on the “dirty, dull and dangerous parts of accessibility mapping.” “These robots will make quick work of this extremely important process,” the project’s Cal Poly manager said.

3.

SLO County is incentivizing new housing development by considering two policies which will encourage developers to build multifamily complexes and give building code exceptions to projects that provide affordable units. Both align with California’s housing goals and mirror ordinances that localities have implemented statewide. Currently, there are 753 affordable housing units countywide and 300 of them are in unincorporated parts of the county, where the proposed policies would target. 

4.

The same cables that provide high speed internet could help detect a massive earthquake in California as it’s happening. Scientists at Cal Poly Humboldt measured the ways fiber internet cables wiggled during the quakes — particularly the cables that run under the ocean — since earthquakes originating off land are much harder to detect before the damaging seismic waves reach people. Scientists say the technology could warn Californians if the “big one” ever does come.

5.

A self-proclaimed “MAGA dentist” joked that she would withhold pain medication from liberal patients in a viral video of her speaking at the Republican Liberty Gala in 2021 that recently resurfaced. Over 100 one-star reviews from liberals online flooded her business’s Yelp page following the moment’s TikTok revival. The dentist also said she has a hat that reads “Make your smile great again” and wrote an op-ed called “You Can’t Cancel Me” in her local Santa Clarita paper in which she called the joke “lighthearted.”