The front of the Fowler Athletic Center at San Diego State includes a pair of double doors that open from the inside out. Replacing them with revolving doors would seem appropriate, given all the comings and goings nowadays.

SDSU had two dozen football players — including five starters on the defense — enter the NCAA transfer portal, which opened Friday. The first wave of candidates to replace them visited over the weekend.

And by Sunday afternoon, SDSU announced its first two signings. It was a package deal.

Sophomore offensive linemen Charlton and Mercer Luniewski are Michigan State transfers from Cincinnati. And twins.

Charlton Luniewski’s social media says that he goes by “Big Chuck,” although Mercer is listed as an inch taller and 13 pounds heavier at 6-foot-6, 320. Mercer is also, by the way, 45 minutes older.

Charlton profiles at guard and Mercer at tackle, though SDSU typically works players in multiple spots to find the ideal fit. The twins are expected to challenge for spots on the two-deep if not the starting O-line, which lost three starters to graduation.

The twins were highly recruited two years ago out of Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy, where they also competed in track and basketball. They have three years of eligibility remaining.

The Luniewskis were among a dozen transfer recruits who visited SDSU over the weekend. Commitments have come from half of them. More recruits are scheduled for the coming this week as the Aztecs look to replenish the roster.

SDSU also received a commitment Sunday from Nate Henrich, a 6-6 edge from Division II Gannon University in Pennsylvania. Henrich had six tackles at Gannon, but he is viewed as having high upside with good size and length. He could provide needed depth at a position where the Aztecs lost four players to the portal.

SDSU also expects commitments from Oregon State edge Kai Wallin, Portland State safety Isaiah Green and College of the Sequoias wide receiver Marshel Sanders.

Wallin is a 6-5 senior from Sacramento who played in nine games this season (seven starts) for the Beavers, making 17 tackles with one sack and four quarterback hurries. Green, a 6-1 junior from Oxnard, had a team-high 101 tackles at Portland State. Sanders is a 5-11 junior from Fresno who had 70 receptions for 929 yards and four touchdowns.

Bostick back

SDSU wide receiver Jacob Bostick announced on his social media Sunday that he is returning for the 2026 season.

His post read, in part: “Excited to get back to work with my coaches and teammates.”

Bostick had 11 catches for 157 yards and three touchdowns over six games before suffering a season-ending knee injury during practice six games into the season. He anticipates being ready to return by fall camp.

Dec. 30 marked the one-year anniversary of our Facebook community group, Escondido Fights Illegal Fireworks: Coco’s Crusade. While awareness has increased, illegal fireworks continue unchecked. On Christmas Eve, our neighborhood was again bombarded. Our dog was shaking uncontrollably and had to be sedated — no family should have to medicate a pet to survive a holiday. This is not a minor inconvenience. Across the city, parents struggled to get children to sleep, residents with PTSD experienced severe distress and workers were left exhausted. These are deliberate, illegal acts that disrupt entire neighborhoods.

Other cities have taken decisive action by using drones and deploying officers on key nights. While Escondido’s mayor and council say they are listening, current measures lack urgency and enforcement. Families are fleeing town or sitting in cars for hours simply to find peace. Illegal fireworks violate noise ordinances and can constitute animal cruelty. Strong, immediate enforcement is required.

— Heather Middleton, Escondido

For years, asking for shelter in the city of San Diego has often been a first-come, first-serve process.

Everyone deserves a safe place to sleep, the thinking goes, so anyone living outside should have a shot.

But as the region’s overwhelmed shelter system continues to reject staggering numbers of requests, some leaders are considering overhauling that approach by creating a priority list based on vulnerability.

“Do we need to look at how we prioritize differently?” Lisa Jones, president and CEO of the San Diego Housing Commission, asked during a board meeting in December. “Maybe we have to look at our most vulnerable that are on our streets and think about it from that perspective.”

Local city-funded shelters have long been at or near capacity, with the pressure becoming particularly intense in recent months.

In November, San Diego received 2,442 requests for a bed, according to Casey Snell, a senior vice president at the housing commission. Only 199 of those led to someone getting a spot. That’s a success rate of around 8%.

The main reasons most requests failed were familiar ones: There just weren’t spots available.

The bigger picture is not much better. Since July, people have asked for shelter 12,275 times. A little more than 1,200 succeeded, meaning about 9 out of every 10 requests failed. “What happens with credibility and effectiveness when people repeatedly get a negative answer?” Housing Commissioner Ryan Clumpner asked during the same meeting. “Do they keep requesting, or do people, the more times they hear ‘no,’ begin becoming more resistant?”

Some residents are certainly asking more than once. November’s 2,442 beds requests were collectively made by 868 separate households, officials said. That’s an average of about 3 asks per individual.

‘It makes sense to me’

The idea of trying to rank those requests appears to have at least some supporters within both the service world and the homeless population.

Bob McElroy, CEO of the nonprofit Alpha Project, said in an interview that using vulnerability lists would be a return to how shelters operated decades ago. “I’ve been irritated all these years when they turned away from it,” he noted. Disabled residents, older adults, those who’ve been outside the longest — McElroy believes it’s only fair to give them first dibs.

That’s roughly the process already in place at Father Joe’s Villages, at least when it comes to beds relying on private, not government, funding. The stricter criteria applies to hundreds of spots in the nonprofit’s family, sober-living and recuperative care programs.

“We look at, for instance, is a person pregnant?” said Deacon Jim Vargas, Father Joe’s president and CEO. “If they have very small children, or if they’ve given birth recently, they’re considered more vulnerable.”

Gustavo Prado, a 52-year-old who’s been homeless for the last two years, agreed with the general concept. “It makes sense to me,” he said while standing on a downtown San Diego sidewalk.

Prado added that he’d been unable to get into a local shelter program. Speaking a few days before Christmas, he was trying to plan for the coming rain. “I gotta get a tarp or something.”

Shelters do sometimes focus on specific populations. There’s a program downtown, for example, for women and children, and another for young adults. But guidelines known as the Continuum of Care Community Standards, which help dictate who’s allowed in, don’t have prioritization criteria.

In response to a request for comment about changing the status quo, city spokesperson Matt Hoffman wrote in an email that “staff are always open to evaluating new tools to better serve those in need.”

Leaders will likely discuss the possibility of creating a priority list at another public meeting before a specific proposal is drawn up.

More requests

One factor potentially driving the surge in demand is San Diego’s decision to expand encampment sweeps.

In July, the city signed an agreement with the California Department of Transportation, or Caltrans, to get access to land that would normally be under state jurisdiction. Since then, many areas near freeways have been cleared of tents and dozens of individuals did receive some form of shelter. A few even made it into a permanent housing.

Yet they appear to be in the minority.

Housing commission officials have so far declined to blame the Caltrans agreement for the increase in requests, saying mainly that they’ll continue studying this trend. They did, however, note a few other factors at play.

For one, the city may be getting better at fielding requests for shelter. On the same day local crews got access to Caltrans property, San Diego opened a homelessness resource center in the downtown library. That office, known as The Hub, coordinates with the help line 211 to make it easier for people to ask for aid. “It’s actually streamlining our referral process, which is another reason you see a big jump,” added Snell, the vice president.

In addition, the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office continues to roll out a phone app that lets outreach workers look for shelter beds in the same way a tourist might search for hotel rooms. While it used to take hours to determine whether facilities had any openings, officials have said this program can flag vacancies within minutes.