Ex-Cal TE McCallan Castles Returns to Berkeley as UC Davis Star

He is one of three former Golden Bears players now on the UC Davis roster for Saturday's game

McCallan Castles was Cal’s starting tight end when the Bears faced UC Davis in 2019 at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley. He was cheered.

McCallan Castles will be UC Davis’ starting tight end when Cal faces the Aggies on Saturday at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley. He expects to be booed.

Castles is one of three players who wore Cal uniforms in the 2019 game against UC Davis but will be on the UC Davis sidelines on Saturday. And two are expected to be starters for the Aggies against their former team. Castles will be a starting tight end for the Aggies. Evan Tattersall, who played the past four years at Cal and was hosted by Castles on his transfer recruiting visit to UC Davis, is likely to be a starting linebacker for UC Davis. And Jack Newman, who was a walk-on at Cal in 2019, competed with last year’s starting quarterback Miles Hastings for the starting quarterback job at Davis this offseason.  Hastings apparently has won the job, however.

Castles is the one who has become a star at Davis. He was recently named a preseason third-team FCS All-American by Phil Steele after catching 27 passes for 387 yards and four touchdowns last season and recording 12 receptions for 194 yards and three scores in Davis’ five-game 2021 spring season, earning him first-team all-Big Sky honors.

An NFL career is not out of the question for the 6-foot-5, 235-pound Castles.

And he had an interesting reaction when he first saw Cal on Davis’ schedule for 2022.

“All I could think about was that I’m probably going to get booed by a lot of people when I walk in there,” Castles said in the video atop the story. “I had a little bit of backlash when I left there, but that’s how college football fans are, so you never know. It’s been a few years, so I don’t know if they’ll still remember me, but it’ll be fun to go back there and play them.”

Castles still has friends on the Cal squad, and is looking forward to seeing Cal coach Justin Wilcox again. And he got a kick out of watching film of Cal in preparation for Saturday’s game, knowing many of the Bears’ players personally.

Castles was one of Cal's highest rated recruits in the class of 2018, and he was a starter in Cal’s 27-13 victory over Davis in 2019 as a redshirt freshman. But he had only one pass thrown his way and had no receptions in that game.

It was less than two weeks after that game that he decided to leave Cal. He says he was too hasty in his decision out of high school, and he was not ready for the city life he found in Berkeley.

“Now that I’m older I can honestly say that I was still immature, just out of high school, wasn’t ready for that kind of culture shock, going from the mountains to a city,” said Castles, who is from South Lake Tahoe, Calif. “The city wore down on me, I wasn’t ready for that kind of school, the way football was going for me, I kind of let it all funnel into me and it was kind of overwhelming. It was one of those things where it felt like it wasn’t going to get any better. So I kind of had to take a step back and leave.”

Hawkins gave Castles a call, and he visited UC Davis and loved it. “It was wide open, far away from the Berkeley city life,” he said, “so it was more close to what I wanted. Been here ever since and very happy with the decision.”

He has no hard feelings toward Cal, admitting that he had some “well-earned” negative feedback from coaches when he was immature.

The differences in Cal’s FBS program and Davis’ FCS operation is not dramatic, Castle says. The chief difference is in the perks and facilities at FBS schools. But he thinks the Aggies have a chance to win Saturday’s game. UC Davis is ranked 22nd in the coaches preseason FCS poll and return many of the players from last year’s 8-4 squad that beat FBS team Tulsa and reached the FCS playoffs.

“We like to into it with the mentality that we’re going to win,” “They don’t have a whole lot of returners there so they're kind of finding themselves this year, and we have a lot of guys coming back and we’ve had a chance to develop our offense around the guys we have this spring. So I think we have a pretty good chance. We’ve got a good game plan in that’s really solid, and I think we have some solid dudes that can do some damage Saturday.”

Hawkins said this week he thinks this is the best UC Davis team in the history of Aggies football.

Cover photo of McCallan Castles (87) celebrating courtesy of UC Davis Athletics

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