During the 1997-98 academic year, four University of the Pacific sophomores occupied neighboring rooms in Southwest Hall. A mutual highlight that year was their weekend study group, known as the Sunday Night Club.

“It was hilariously unsuccessful in motivating us, since it was mostly a hangout despite best study intentions,” recalled Darla Sasaki ’00.

Three decades later, the four friends—Sasaki, Radena (Stager) Hampton ’00, Alison Lum ’00 and Melissa (Bauman) Ryan ’00--learned of Pacific’s plans to rebuild Southwest Hall by 2026. Inspired, the group committed $25,000 to name a room in the new building.

They selected one of their own residential rooms, Room 216, and named it after the Sunday Night Club. 

“This gift is a really nice way to memorialize that snapshot in time, and to recognize that we’re still friends all these years later,” Sasaki said. “We’re happy to commemorate what the four of us have built, together and separately, with the foundation that we got at Pacific.”

Sasaki, Hampton, Lum and Ryan are among thousands of alumni who have called Southwest Hall home. Like many others, they enjoyed the building’s central location, the deep sense of engagement with the Stockton Campus community and the ease of connecting with friends. 

They had lived together and formed the Sunday Night Club the previous year, and when they moved to Southwest, the club came with them. Other members rotated in and out, but the four friends remained consistent. 

“We managed to stay really close together in Southwest, and I think that cemented the fact that we were going to be friends forever,” Sasaki said.  

True to prediction, while the four have gone on to separate lives and careers, the friendships that blossomed in Southwest Hall have endured, encompassing marriages and children, jobs and moves. Sasaki lives in Sunnyvale, California, and is a manager at Google. Hampton is raising her family in Austin, Texas after spending nearly 17 years with Apple, most recently as global HR operations director. Lum, in San Francisco, is a licensed pharmacist and vice president of pharmacy services at Blue Shield of California. Ryan resides in San Jose and is a longtime product manager for Adobe. 

“Pacific has been the foundational piece of so much in our lives, and it’s exciting to now be in a position to give back,” Sasaki said. “It’s a fun thing that the four of us could do together. We’re also a little tickled at the idea that, because someone is going to live in 216, the idea of the Sunday Night Club may live on.”  

One of ten original buildings on the Stockton Campus, Southwest Hall welcomed its first residents in 1924. The new Southwest will resemble the original, recreating its historic exterior while gaining a modern, sustainable interior.

The building will house nearly 400 students, mostly second-years, to accommodate Pacific’s growing residential student population and support the university’s 4-year housing guarantee. The university hopes to reopen Southwest Hall in Fall 2026.

“It's been exciting to see Pacific grow since I was there, and I look forward to seeing where the university will be another 20 or 30 years from now,” Sasaki said.

“Hopefully other alumni will see our gift and be inspired to give to the university, but also inspired to hold onto the relationships they built there,” she continued. “We had a really good time being at Pacific and being together, and I hope that other people have the same thing.”  

To share your Southwest Hall photos and memories, click here. 

To learn about giving and naming opportunities in Southwest Hall, contact Molly Byrne, senior associate vice president for development, at 209.946.2780 or mbyrne1@pacific.edu.