The Abridged version:
- Last fall, Sacramento State and Cal Expo announced big plans to bring Hornet football to the home of the California State Fair within a year. However, the university’s home opener Saturday is set to take place on campus at Hornet Stadium.
- Emails between the two state agencies show a breakdown in communication and the timeline within months of publicly unveiling the project.
- A Sacramento State spokesperson said the university plans to announce an update on the project’s status soon. In the meantime, officials from both organizations did not answer questions about whether the fairgrounds stadium was still expected to happen at all.
The Sacramento State Hornets are set to take the field Saturday for their first home football game of the season at their familiar on-campus stadium.
Granted, a year ago school officials hoped to be playing elsewhere by now.
What would have been in time for the team’s first season playing in the higher-level Football Bowl Subdivision, university officials announced plans to create a new stadium at Cal Expo, expanding on the existing grandstands to host games in front of larger crowds than Hornet Stadium currently fits.
Players and fans were told to expect the new stadium by the start of this season across town at the Cal Expo fairgrounds, in place of the now-shuttered horse track.
As of this week, uneven ground covered in dry grass sits inside the dirt track. Palm trees face grandstand bleachers with no indication of additional seating. In other words, the grounds at Cal Expo appear more prepared for a day of horse racing than a college football game.
Emails between Cal Expo and Sacramento State leadership teams show an aggressive push to convert the racetrack to a collegiate football stadium that was waylaid within months, seemingly by insufficient communication and funding uncertainty. By early this year, cost estimates fluctuated from $170 million to nearly $212 million, according to the emails.
Sign Up for the Morning Newsletter
The Abridged morning newsletter lands in your inbox every weekday morning with the latest news from the Sacramento region.
Representatives from the fairgrounds and university declined to comment on the exact reasons for the delay or why they tried fast-tracking construction within a year.
They also did not answer questions about their updated construction goals, if any progress has been made this year or whether the project is still expected to happen at all.
“Both organizations have been focused on their respective priorities, including Cal Expo’s recently completed California State Fair,” Alex Alcantar, Cal Expo director of marketing and business development, said in a statement. “At this time, there are no new developments to report.”
Despite the previously announced plans for the Cal Expo site, Sacramento State has six home games scheduled between now and November, all at Hornet Stadium.
‘It’s all there’
When the joint effort became public last August, officials had already spent months meeting, planning and declaring optimism.
University leadership said they saw all the pieces there — or mostly there — at Cal Expo, ready to be assembled into a new “Sacramento State Athletic Park.”
“This is a site our community is already going to with large attendance, so I have (extreme) confidence this site can handle 6 Saturdays of football,” Sacramento State Athletic Director Mark Orr said June 24, 2025, according to a meeting summary report.
Orr said a new field was the program’s first priority. Temporary seating, enough for roughly 25,000 people, plus modular locker rooms could help them “get by” in the Cal Expo stadium. They also would need to add enough lighting to make the game visible for TV broadcasts and streaming.
“The four main pieces noted above are necessary and I’m confident in our progress, in addition parking is already there and grandstands with press boxes, etc.,” Orr said, “it’s all there.”
Launching an aggressive schedule
They also recognized the plan was ambitious.
“Ideally, we would like to host our first home game (there) in September 2026. Recognizing this is an aggressive schedule,” Chris McAlary, interim chief financial officer for Sacramento State, wrote in an email June 12, 2025.
The project called for a total transformation of the historic grandstand.
A football field would take over the defunct horse track, on the eastern edge of the fairgrounds. Along with lighting, locker rooms and additional bleachers, “cosmetic improvements,” such as splashes of Sacramento State green and gold, would make the space game-day ready.
Before any major facade changes, the agencies went through multiple geographic and environmental evaluations.
Emails through early April show at least one of those reports — a review under the California Environmental Quality Act, which project leaders were requesting an exemption from — still outstanding. Officials did not clarify the current status of that review or exemption.
Abridged by PBS KVIE in April requested almost a year’s worth of communications from both Sacramento State and Cal Expo. Each returned records in July.
Representatives for the university said they did not have any emails to share discussing the Cal Expo stadium project dated between November 2025 and this spring coming to or out of the president’s office, communications team or athletics department.
Sacramento State spokesperson Michelle Willard said the school plans to provide an update on the project status sometime soon.
Progress slows
Sac State President Luke Wood, Athletic Director Orr and Cal Expo CEO Tom Martinez announced the proposed stadium — and its 2026 completion goal — at a special meeting of the fairground board Aug. 28, 2025.
Aside from a couple reports in October of the project’s initial price tag (then roughly $170 million), both sides went largely silent in public during the months that followed.
Behind the scenes, project managers from each agency kept up regular communication.
However, cracks began to show before the holiday season.
“We will have a deeper, true discussion with CSU for timelines of construction at the grandstand since it now looks like our belief and goal of 2026 maybe not be exactly what they are thinking,” Matt Cranford, chief deputy general manager for Cal Expo, wrote in an Oct. 27 email to two colleagues and an outside contractor.
That contractor, Robert Murray Stroud, a service delivery director at KAI Partners, had been on board since May 2025, helping manage the project from Cal Expo’s side. He did not return a request for comment from Abridged.
Stroud said he had spoken with Martinez about “maintaining momentum” going into 2026, in an end-of-year email to Cranford, Mitch Pryor, Cal Expo’s chief of plant and maintenance operations, and Executive Analyst Lisa Landry.
“I’m particularly interested in exploring tangible, inspiring steps that help bring the vision to life,” Stroud wrote the day before Christmas Eve.
Possibilities, he said, included painting the grandstand area green and gold or making noticeable transformations to the infield.
Target moved back
Days out from Sacramento State’s 2026 home opener, though, the grounds at Cal Expo, as visible from the nearby American River Parkway, show no clear signs of change.
A little more than a month after penning his email about building momentum and moving the project forward, Stroud sent a Feb. 9 update to Cranford, stating “the program timeline has shifted from a Fall 2026 target to Fall 2027.”
Stroud did not say explicitly the reason for the change, nor did any other email from a Cal Expo or Sacramento State representative. But he noted what may have slowed progress was a lack of “shared confidence” among the officials involved, as well as unresolved financial questions.
At that point, there was a 7% chance of finishing by September, according to probability models, Stroud wrote.
His email also noted an estimated $212 million price, up from before. Other emails from Cal Expo leadership mention potentially using bonds to pay for costs.
‘The board would have wanted to know’
Neither agency made a clear public announcement about the timeline change. And by the start of 2026, Sacramento State’s attention had seemed to turn elsewhere.
In a February story on the university’s move to the FBS and Mid-American Conference, the campus paper, the State Hornet, quoted Wood saying, “It’ll be an updated Hornet Stadium for the next two years.”
A Sacramento Bee story from March cited a study that estimated renovating the on-campus stadium would cost between $250 million and $300 million, while bringing in about $458 million in economic impact. The Cal Expo option was cheaper, but still about $171 million, according to the study. Its anticipated economic return was closer to $261 million.
That story also noted the university’s plan to stay put in 2026.
That decision was news to the public, as well as Cal Expo’s own leadership.
“All relevant and important info I think the board would have wanted to know before articles in the paper,” Kim Craig, a director on the fairgrounds board, wrote in an email to Martinez that day.
“I understand you can’t always be on top of what they say but seems as if there is a lot more information out there that maybe the board isn’t privy to,” she added.
Craig did not respond to a request for comment.
Mutually beneficial
The partnership was pitched as a win for both Sacramento State and Cal Expo.
Hornet football has been in an era of rebranding and expansion under Wood. The university president has often stated his intent to elevate the school’s athletic reputation, a dream partially achieved by the move to a new conference in the highest tier of Division I football.
And it was a force behind setting sights on a change in scenery.
“Cal Expo provides an opportunity for us to go much bigger,” Wood said last September. “It’s a much larger vision for what we want to do with athletics.”
The university announced plans in 2024 to rebuild Hornet Stadium but pivoted soon after when they said Cal Expo officials approached them.
The idea of a revamped venue fit in well with fairground leaders’ ambitions to create “the premier event facility in Northern California,” as stated in the agreement with Sacramento State.
And with the decades of horse racing coming to an end in spring 2025 and the Sacramento Republic FC moving to the Railyards in 2028, Cal Expo had a hole to fill in its athletics offerings.
“Cal Expo has a long history of hosting major community events,” said Martinez last fall. “This potential partnership reflects our mission to serve the region by providing facilities that bring people together.”
