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For most teenagers, choosing a college and a future career feels less like a decision and more like a referendum on the rest of their lives. But for Chase Alderton, the path ahead felt largely written before he ever filled out an application.
Growing up in the San Fernando Valley as the second of four siblings, Alderton remembers watching his older brother head off to city college. “We had the city college route in our blood,” he joked. So when it came time to decide where he’d go to school, he didn’t overthink it.
Santa Barbara City College emerged as the natural choice. It also helped that Alderton’s cousin, Ashley Farias, worked as an administrative assistant in the PE athletics department. At the time, Alderton was considering a career in athletics and hoped to assist her once he arrived. “She was one of the first real role models I had outside my parents,” he said of Farias. “Her work ethic and dedication to SBCC are incredible and continue to this day, as she’s held various roles on campus for [more than] 20 years.”
There were other, more immediate reasons, too. “What drove me to Santa Barbara is, I was dating a girl at the time who was going to Santa Barbara City College,” he said with a laugh. The relationship ended not long after he arrived, but the move itself turned out to be one of the most consequential decisions of his life.
For the first time, Alderton was away from home — away from parents, childhood friends, and any pre-set expectations. He came mostly on his own, and that, he said, mattered. “It was the first time where I really had to just figure things out,” he explained. “There was no real plan, and parents aren’t around to tell you what to do.”
At SBCC, that sense of uncertainty didn’t fade so much as it became productive. Through his cousin’s role in the athletic department, he was pulled into the college’s sports community and given a behind-the-scenes look at collegiate athletics. He also took classes with head women’s basketball coach Sandrine Rocher-Krul, who, he said, was “a great leader and helped me develop many of the philosophies I still use today.” Alderton described her as a “mentor” and “trailblazer by nature,” someone whose ability to balance family life with a demanding travel schedule helped shape his own ambitions.
Peter Aguilar, who worked in the athletic department, also left a lasting impression by tying coursework to real-world experience. “Those were my favorite kinds of classes and teachers,” Alderton said. “I tried to take as many of his classes as possible.”
For a while, coaching and sports felt like a clear direction. But as he got closer to the realities of the field — limited job openings, constant mobility, and little geographic stability — he realized it wasn’t the life he wanted. Rather than treating that realization as a failure of planning, he treated it as a necessary adjustment.
After attending SBCC from 2008 to 2011, Alderton transferred to UC Santa Barbara, where he majored in psychology and graduated in 2013. With a psychology degree in hand, Alderton graduated without a defined career path, moving through jobs more as exploration than strategy — personal training, then bartending. Marketing entered his life almost by accident, through a friend at a local agency. “I kind of stumbled into it, to be honest,” he said. What he found was a natural fit: a blend of creativity, strategy, and human behavior. His psychology background, once incidental, suddenly became useful.
In 2018, he joined Recharge Payments, then a small startup in Santa Monica, and rose through the company over six years. He left in early 2024, later leading marketing at two other companies before another turning point arrived — this time alongside the impending arrival of his first child. He and his wife, whom he met at SBCC, began rethinking structure, stability, and time. The result was a shift into contract marketing, building a portfolio of clients instead of committing to a single full-time role.
There was no master plan guiding the transition — just experience, relationships, and a growing comfort with uncertainty. Early this year, he formalized that work as Alderton Marketing Group.
Looking back, Alderton resists the idea that any of it was carefully mapped out. “The plans that I’ve had for the future have never worked,” he reflected, “and I’ve always just had to kind of figure out what’s right in front of me.”
When asked if he would change his decision to attend Santa Barbara City College, he doesn’t hesitate. He says he “absolutely would not change any of that for the world — I think I landed in the right place.” In many ways, he added, it was the first place that taught him not just how to choose a path, but how to keep moving when there wasn’t one.
This article was paid for by Santa Barbara City College. For more information on Santa Barbara City College and the hundreds of programs they offer, visit sbcc.edu or call (805) 965-0581. If you are an SBCC alumnus, please join SBCC Alumni Connect at sbccfoundation.org/alumni.
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