Staff and faculty who work in Sacramento State’s Folsom Hall were stunned to find a new resident alongside them at the start of the spring 2025 semester.

Sac State’s football team was silently being moved into the building. The team would be taking most of the third floor for new offices and future meeting rooms as well as temporarily occupying other spaces on the first floor.

Staff and faculty in the building said none of the departments received any notice about the move-in.

“We came in one morning and found Folsom Hall in complete disarray and people in all our classrooms,” Chair of Sac State’s school of nursing, Tanya Altmann, said. “Nursing has been in this building for more than 10 years – probably close to 15 years now – so we kind of had a system here that has been pretty disrupted.”

Altmann said that the College of Health and Human Services was in discussions to take over the third floor, but those plans have officially been scrapped.

“When they’re saying nobody was using the third floor, [that] nobody wanted the third floor, that’s not quite correct,” Altmann said. “We, being the college, had renovated space up there, and it got moved.”

Linda Paumer is a gerontology lecturer and head of the Cardiovascular Wellness Program, which operates on the third floor alongside the new football offices. She said that, while the team’s move-in hasn’t affected them yet, it has brought about a new concern.

“I just hope they don’t want my space too,” Paumer said. “We’ve been here for 10 years, so I hope we get some squatter’s rights or something.”

Operations Coordinator at Sac State’s Population Research Center, Jessica Gollaher, said one of the biggest issues she encountered was Sac State football players riding their electric scooters inside the hall.

“That hadn’t been an issue for us until football moved in,” Gollaher said. “If they hit a kid or someone who is disabled, that could be a big problem because it’s not just people here from the university.”

Gollaher said that the incidents have slowed down as the semester went on, and she hasn’t seen that happen in a month. She said she credits the coaching staff for stepping in.

Paumer said she attributed many of the issues and frustrations to the increase in people and the lack of communication.

“Whether that’s football or not, there’s more people in the building,” Paumer said. “The football team probably gets the rap because they are the newest players.”

Gollaher said moving the team into Folsom Hall before their space is ready has forced players to use space that’s typically used by nursing and physical therapy students.

While the third floor is under construction, the team has been using open lecture rooms on the first floor, multiple staff said. In addition to this, the team has also added Sac State-branded signs with slogans to the back of some of the lecture rooms.

Karen Magana, administrative support coordinator for Sac State’s nursing program, said she recalled seeing students who were studying moved out of the student lounge area so a sign could be put up there.

“They’re just kind of pushing people out,” Magana said. “This is our building, and we all feel like we are in their way.”

Gollaher said that she found out about the football’s move into Folsom Hall by a sign change, which struck a nerve. She said that her organization’s sign change took six months, but the football team got one quickly.

With the quick implementation of the football team to Folsom Hall, staff and faculty who have been in the building for years said they feel neglected.

“It bothers us that we spend all this money on football when we’re cutting back classes,” Altmann said. “Don’t make it so obvious that we’ve got this privileged group versus the mission of our university, which is academics.”

Despite Paumer’s concerns, she said she hopes that having football on the third floor will benefit her program, as they both share common ideals of physical health and mental wellness.

Like Paumer, Altmann said she hopes some positives can come from an increase in the off-campus building’s surge of people.

“In some respects, I look forward to having more people in the building. We’ve been slightly off campus,” Altmann said. “We have suffered from not having any food services in our building. We were thinking, with football here, maybe we could get some food services, or some things that could help us with more people in here.”

During Sac State President Luke Wood’s “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit, Wood was directly asked about his response to the Folsom Hall situation.

RELATED: President Luke Wood answered student questions on his first live Reddit AMA session

Sac State responded to The State Hornet’s request for an interview and list of questions with the statement provided below:

“The space now in use by the football program has sat vacant for the past decade and, in fact, multiple other departments have turned down offers to use the space. The football program has needed, for years, more meeting space and office space for student athletes and coaches, who are Unit 3 faculty. This is the first semester they have been in Folsom Hall and are still transitioning into the space.”

Magana said she would like to see more respect given from the football team and administration to Folsom Hall’s original residents.

“You don’t go to somebody else’s home and take over,” Magana said. “Essentially this is our home, and they’ve come in and disrespected it, and nobody seems to care.”