I’m going to steal a phrase I learned from California University of Pennsylvania men’s basketball coach Kent McBride.

During an interview I had with McBride during the Vulcans season, he called their most recent season a “trial” season.

I would use the same description to talk about this past year with the California Times. It was a trial season, but more importantly a learning season.

I had a whole new team of editors in Jessica Crosson, Danny Beeck, Taylor Barta and Mari Boyle. This newspaper couldn’t happen without them, so I thank them for learning so much this year and putting out a great product.

We made mistakes this year, but we learned from them. We transitioned the size of our newspaper, and at the end of the fall semester we had to transition from different printing companies. We’re still working with our new company to make this newspaper look the best it can.

There’s still a lot more learning to be done, but going into the 2017-2018 school year, which will be my senior year and second term as Editor-In-Chief of the Cal Times, we will be adding another member to the team to help in this learning endeavor.

Recently, we just elected James Rudolph to be our new opinions editor, as Mari will move over to News editor. Danny will stay in his role as sports editor while Jess remains our entertainment editor. Taylor will remain our incredibly creative graphic designer.

I believe that we’re heading into a really good direction for the newspaper next year. This year, we tried out a lot of new and different things, whether it be with our angles that we take stories or our design of the paper. Everything was seemingly different this year, even if it didn’t quite jump out.

We have a great staff of writers, editors and multimedia journalists. Needless to say, I’m excited to see what 2017-18 brings for us.

I hope you continue to read the Cal Times, both online and in print. I also encourage the students to keep updated with CUTV’s News Center, whom we really partnered with this year. Next year, our relationship will continue to blossom.

As for now, I’m happy with where we’re at. But I can’t wait to do more in the fall.