Most people who live near College of Marin know exactly one fact about it: it's the school with the ballfields you pass on College Avenue, the one where parking gets tight during registration weeks and easy again by October. Ask a longtime Kentfield resident what happens inside the buildings and you'll mostly get a shrug. That's the assumption this piece is built to correct. The 100-year-old campus a few blocks from Kent Woodlands spent this year proving it's not background scenery. It's the busiest, cheapest, most overlooked cultural venue in town, and the fall calendar it just settled back into is the same one, minus the banners.
College of Marin was founded in 1926. This is its centennial year, and the college treated the milestone as an occasion to open its doors wider than usual rather than throw one closed-door party and call it done.
A Hundred Years, Confirmed in One Week in May
The clearest evidence came during Centennial Showcase week, May 4 through May 9, when the Kentfield campus ran a self-guided, open-to-anyone series of exhibitions and performances across nearly every building. The College of Marin Symphony Orchestra performed Dvořák's Prague Waltzes and Beethoven's Symphony No. 2 at the James Dunn Theatre, with cellists Renn Smith and Miriam Perkoff featured in a Julius Klengel concerto for two cellos. The Art Department mounted a full student show in the COM Art Gallery spanning sculpture, ceramics, painting, photography, printmaking and jewelry. Deedy Hall hosted an EOPS alumni exhibit tracing former students who transferred out and built careers. A pop-up makerspace in the Academic Center let visitors brew tea from different world regions and fold origami butterflies onto the gates outside.
None of that required a College of Marin ID or tuition payment. It required walking onto the campus during a week most residents didn't know was happening.
The rest of the centennial calendar played out the same way. A Centennial Gala was held April 4 at the Bill and Adele Jonas Center on the Indian Valley campus in Novato, the college's second site, drawing alumni and donors to mark the milestone formally. Back in January, the Kentfield campus opened its spring semester with a Convocation at the James Dunn Theatre that folded centennial trivia and an alumni panel into the usual start-of-year staff meeting, a small sign that the anniversary wasn't treated as a side event even in the college's own internal calendar.
The Building Nobody's Toured Yet
The physical proof that this centennial year produced something lasting sits on the Kentfield campus right now: the David Wain Coon Center for Student Success, a new building that had its ribbon cutting this year and now houses, among other things, a Professional Learning and Development Center for staff. It's the kind of capital project that would ordinarily draw a mention in a town newsletter and nothing more. Paired with a hundred-year anniversary, it reads differently. The college didn't just survive to its centennial. It's still building.
For a Kentfield resident who has never had a reason to walk past the Community Education wing or the Center for Student Success, that's the practical takeaway. The buildings changed this year. The campus you remember from five years ago isn't quite the campus that's there now.
The Trophy Case Got a Centennial Plaque Too
Athletics didn't sit out the anniversary. On June 16, College of Marin Athletics announced its Hall of Fame Class of 2026, five inductees including two historic teams, explicitly framed as being honored during the centennial year. The timing wasn't incidental. A hundred years of a community college usually means a hundred years of intramural teams nobody remembers, and the athletics department used the anniversary to pull some of that history back into view rather than let it stay buried in old programs.
The current teams gave the centennial its own present-tense material. The Mariners baseball team entered the playoffs as Bay Valley Conference champions on April 28, then saw its season end in a NorCal regional matchup on May 5. That result won't make headlines outside Marin, and that's the point. This is community college athletics in the truest sense, teams built from and watched by the same town, and this year those teams had a milestone anniversary as a backdrop.
What's Actually Left Standing Now That the Banners Are Down
Fall semester started August 24 for weekday classes, with weekend classes beginning two days earlier. Labor Day falls on September 7, and the deadline to add a full-term in-person class runs to September 11, with online adds cut off two days later. None of that is centennial programming. It's the ordinary academic calendar the college runs every year, and it's exactly what's happening on the Kentfield campus as of this week.
That ordinary calendar is the real subject of this post, because the centennial year didn't invent new programming, it just put a spotlight on programming that was already there and mostly ignored by people who live a five-minute walk from campus.
What that means in practice for the rest of this year:
- The Performing Arts Calendar keeps running through fall, the same one that hosted the Centennial Showcase's symphony concert. Concerts and exhibitions at the James Dunn Theatre and the COM Art Gallery don't stop when the anniversary banners come down.
- Athletics Events continue on the same public schedule that produced this spring's conference championship, with fall games open to the public and a walk away for anyone in Kent Woodlands or the flats.
- Community Education classes, the noncredit and lifelong-learning offerings the college has run for a century, remain open to residents who aren't degree-seeking students at all. This is the access point most people overlook entirely.
A campus that just spent a year proving it has real concerts, a real gallery, real teams and a real new building isn't going to stop having those things in October. The difference is that nobody's putting a centennial sign on the door to remind you.
If there's one thing this year settled for good, it's that the "community" in community college isn't a marketing phrase for College of Marin. It's a description of who actually shows up.
The Practical Version, If You're Planning a Fall Weekend
Check the college's Performing Arts Calendar and Athletics Events pages before assuming there's nothing to do within walking distance this fall. Both are open to the public, and both just spent a hundredth-anniversary year proving they're worth the walk. The Kentfield campus isn't hiding anything. It's just been quiet about it for a century, and this was the one year it wasn't.
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