California Lutheran University Athletics hosted its 2025 Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony Friday night in Gilbert Arena, during which five individuals and one team were honored: Nick Boggan ’13 (baseball), Joy (Cyprian ’10) Buechler (women’s water polo), Butch Eskridge ’77 (football and basketball), Michelle Lawrence ’17 (women’s volleyball), Lynn Thompson ’66 (football and baseball) and the 2015 NCAA Division III National Championship-winning Regals volleyball team.
“The 2025 Hall of Fame Class represents excellence across generations of student-athletes, coaches, and teams who have made a lasting impact on CLU Athletics,” according to CLU Sports.
Director of Athletics Howard Davis said new Hall of Fame members are inducted every two years. On a rare occasion, Davis said, the 2015 Regals are just the second Cal Lutheran team to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, the other being the 1971 NAIA National Championship-winning Kingsmen football team.
The 2015 Regals volleyball team was the first team to bring an NCAA National Championship trophy home to Cal Lutheran, according to Davis.
“Our 2015 Regals volleyball team is our first NCAA champion, which is a huge deal because it really showed all of our other coaches, ‘Hey, it’s possible to win an NCAA title here in Thousand Oaks,’” Davis said.
As for the individual inductees, Davis said all of these former student-athletes are very accomplished.
“Most of these people all have achieved that kind of All-American status, All-District Status, or [Southern California Intercollegiate Athletic Association] MVP status,” Davis said.
According to Davis, the Hall of Fame Selection Committee, “made up of current hall-of-famers, other interested Cal Lu people,” including “a couple [of] coaches,” decides who will be honored as inductees. Davis said anyone can submit a nomination form on the Athletics Department’s website, which the Selection Committee takes into consideration when deciding who should be inducted.
Davis also said statistics for student-athletes who attended Cal Lutheran in the years before the university’s athletics converted to the NCAA in 1991 are not as abundant as the statistics for student-athletes who competed after that year. For this reason, Davis said, there is also a subcommittee called the “veteran’s committee,” whose responsibility it is to pick “the best of the best that haven’t been inducted yet.”
Krister Swanson ’89, ’95, chairman of the Hall of Fame Selection Committee, said he has been part of the committee since 2017, and that most of the members are hall of fame inductees themselves. Swanson’s father, the Rev. Gerald Swanson, was “Cal Lutheran’s first full-time campus pastor,” according to Conejo Valley Guide.
“It’s just a really cool thing to be a part of this,” Swanson said. “It’s always great to me because when the people come up and speak, … it’s such a reflection of what I love about Cal Lutheran. When you hear people talk about their experience, to thank the people that were instrumental to them, it all resonates with what I saw when I was a kid growing up here, and what I experienced as a student here, and now.”
Rachel Smith ’13, an assistant coach for the 2015 Regals volleyball team, and former player herself, said it was “pretty cool” to see the team inducted into Cal Lutheran’s Hall of Fame. Smith said she was proud to come back to Cal Lutheran and see that the Regals’ win paved the way for the university’s three other national championship titles that came after.
“You don’t realize how big of an impact, like, our win had,” Smith said. “You come back and you see the three other national championships after us, so it’s pretty cool that we kind of, like, kicked that off.”
With the university’s four NCAA Division III National Championship titles: Regals Volleyball (2015), Kingsmen Baseball (2017), Regals Soccer (2023), and Kingsmen Volleyball (2024), Swanson said he hopes these accomplishments can serve as inspiration for future generations of student-athletes.
“This is what we do,” Swanson said. “I hope that young people feel that sense of boundless possibility when they come here. This is a place where big things can happen, and you can build those relationships, and you can be a part of those teams, and you can have those experiences.”
