UCLA head coach Bob Chesney coined it at the beginning of preseason camp last year in Harrisonburg, Va., before leading James Madison to a 12-2 record, a Sun Belt championship and its first College Football Playoff appearance.
“You either compete or complain, you can’t do both,” Chesney said on Aug. 5, 2025. “You are either full of pride and won’t allow yourself to have mental, physical and emotional lack of discipline and toughness, or you fill yourselves with pity and you have a lack of all three of those things.”
Chesney carried that same tune on his first day of fall camp in Westwood, leading his new team.
The Bruin faithful got its first taste of their newly minted head honcho at his introductory news conference on Dec. 9, where he made promises of turning around the football program, elevating it to its height of the past, and reengaging the Bruin community.
UCLA quarterback Nico Iamaleava looks to throw a pass during the first day of preseason camp at Spalding Field on Thursday.
(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)
And Chesney has not wavered since.
From his halftime speech at a UCLA men’s basketball game versus Indiana — where he proclaimed that the Bruins would be Big Ten champions — to throughout spring practice and all through Big Ten media day last week, Chesney has stayed consistent.
And that consistency includes the way he is training his players leading up to UCLA’s opener against California, where the former Pac-12 rivals will meet for a night game between two first-year head coaches.
Chesney has emphasized, throughout his short tenure in Westwood, that while physical development is imperative in the offseason, the mental side of the game carries the same weight. Central to that, is putting players in adverse situations in the offseason to get them battle-tested come game day.
“Those are the moments that test you. Pay no attention to a virtue that’s not been tested in fire, and that’s ultimately something that we got to be able to do is put them in situations where we’ve tested them in fire,” Chesney said. “We know how they’re going to react and how they’re going to respond. We know when the moment’s on the line. That’s the most important thing that we can do out here. That’s what this whole entire camp is ultimately about.”
In order to test his players’ resiliency, Chesney has implemented “compete periods” throughout his time in Westwood to emulate the speed and intensity of live reps.
Alongside competition has been grading everything a player does, so there is no ambiguity as to where a player stands on the depth chart or in the program.
Chesney also talked about the structuring of his practices, specifically with having some in the morning and afternoon to expose his players to the heat. pic.twitter.com/3Ee5K7bYWE
Outside of the actual drills and exercises Chesney implements, the coach has also purposefully scheduled some of his practices in the afternoon to expose his players to the intense Los Angeles heat — his version of throwing his players into the fire to help get them acclimated and test their mental toughness.
Chesney’s mental training ultimately serves as a litmus test in discovering who is cut from a different cloth.
“Procedural discipline was a big part of what we want to make sure that we’re constantly talking about,” Chesney said. “And then, how quickly can I get to the next play? How much do I love being coached, and how hard am I going to be coached and accept that coaching and make myself get better?”
With passion and excitement emanating from players on the first day of fall camp, and less than a month away from the first game of the season, Chesney highlighted that it is about striking a balance: testing his players’ resolve but also not being reactionary.
The new head coach underscored that it can be easy for impulse and emotion to take over, but uplifting one another and letting mistakes refine you rather than define you is integral to success.
UCLA defensive linemen Jacob Busic (97) and Anthony Jones (15) run drills during the first day of preseason camp at Spalding Field on Thursday.
(Ronaldo Bolanos/Los Angeles Times)
Central to that is teammates, particularly within the same position group, celebrating the success of one another rather than letting the depth chart dictate morale.
“If someone’s above you and perceived to be above you, what are you doing? Are you trying to elevate your game and compete with them, or are you trying to knock them down and pull them back towards you?” Chesney asked.
“The best teams in the world love that that guy above him is a little better, and they are chasing him every single day. We have a good amount of that on our team, and it’s got to continue because we are going to need everybody, whether they know it or not,” he said.
UCLA will not play its first game until Sept. 5.
However, battles will be won and lost within the team along the way.
But to Chesney, it is how you respond to those successes and failures that prevail.
CHICAGO — In the nearly nine months since he was hired as head coach at UCLA, Bob Chesney has won over a lot of hearts and minds with his unwavering sense of belief.
First, he won over his star quarterback, Nico Iamaleava, who opted to stick with the Bruins after a 3-9 season a year ago. He won over 45 new transfers, who came to UCLA as part of the portal’s 11th-ranked class and seems to be winning over recruits, too, with UCLA currently ranked in the top 10 among 2027 classes. He even won over once-dormant Bruin donors, who, according to the school’s athletic department, have now poured over $41 million in private support into UCLA athletics over the past fiscal year, an increase of 80% from the previous year.
“It’s his energy, man,” Iamaleava said. “He brings a different type of energy.”
At this point, the only thing it seems Chesney hasn’t won yet at UCLA is an actual football game.
He couldn’t do anything about that Wednesday from the podium at Big Ten media days. Though, as far as first impressions go in this conference, Chesney certainly had a leg up on his predecessor, who stumbled through his own opening address two years ago.
But as the season draws nearer and a new era of Bruin football begins, all the enthusiasm does beg the question: What does a successful debut actually look like for Chesney at UCLA?
Chesney said Wednesday he had no interest in setting those expectations or “in putting artificial limits on ourselves.”
“Outcomes have to be earned,” he said. “And I think in the end, potential is a gift, right? The work is becoming. That’s the work.”
Considering UCLA’s recent history, you can understand why Chesney wouldn’t want to wade too far into setting expectations. Hope, after all, may be his most valuable resource at the moment.
The Bruins are coming off a season in which they won just three games, their fewest in more than 54 years. They’ve reached the nine-win mark once in the past decade. And just two UCLA coaches in a half-century — Jim Mora and Terry Donahue — have clocked a winning campaign in their debut seasons with the Bruins.
“There’s no better place I’d rather be at this moment in time,” Chesney said. “I strongly believe in the power of what UCLA is.”
The collective Big Ten media seems less convinced, having voted the Bruins to finish 13th in their preseason conference poll. That’s exactly where they finished last season.
But there are some things working in Chesney’s favor. For one, a schedule that includes just four opponents picked to finish in the top half of the Big Ten.
It doesn’t hurt, either, that his quarterback got a full spring and summer under his belt as a Bruin. Iamaleava didn’t join the program until late in the process last season after his transfer portal drama dragged out through the spring and summer. Then once he started to find his bearings, UCLA’s coach was fired.
There was no such uncertainty this offseason, as Chesney moved to quickly retain Iamaleava.
“It was a matter of making sure he understood we had a plan,” Chesney said. “That was the most important thing we could do to make sure he stuck around and he did.”
Not only was Iamaleava impressed with his plans to prepare him for the NFL, but he found himself right away swept up in the coach’s personality.
“When you first talk to him,” Iamaleava said, “it kind of sounds like you’re talking to a poet or something, the way the words roll off.”
Chesney is counting on Iamaleava to make things move smoothly for UCLA’s offense this season. But the most marked difference for the Bruins on that side of the ball should be the ground game.
The Bruins boasted one of the least dynamic rushing attacks in the Big Ten a season ago, as Iamaleava led the team with just 505 rushing yards. Their lead running back, Jalen Berger, rushed for a meager 364 yards over the course of the season.
Meanwhile, at James Madison, Chesney had three running backs with as many yards last season. The Dukes rushed for the fifth-most yards (3,381) of any Football Bowl Subdivision team.
Their lead rusher, Wayne Knight, followed Chesney to UCLA and should step in as one of the best backs the Bruins have had in years. Of the 30 backs in college football with over 200 carries, Knight averaged the most yards per carry last season (6.63).
“There’ll be a commitment to playing that style of football,” Chesney said.
The rest is mostly just a projection, a fact that Chesney openly acknowledges.
“Everything here is ultimately conceptual,” he says.
But one change has already taken hold, if you ask Iamaleava. One that might appear unrecognizable from recent history at UCLA.
“He’s definitely changed the mindset in there, just how you feel. I don’t know how to explain it,” Iamaleava said.
“When Ches walks into a room, he just brings that winning mentality.”
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But Plaschke reported his philosophy has quickly forged deep roots in Westwood, where Chesney’s optimism fits in seamlessly at the school built on John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success. There’s also some very strong Ted Lasso energy brewing, which makes sense since the character is partially inspired by Wooden values.
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We’ve heard from some UCLA fans were irritated about a potential Plaschke curse after he announced Chesney will make the Bruins winners, but its seems the Bruin faithful are just going to have get used to a growing bandwagon.
The UCLA hype should go national Wednesday, when quarterback Nico Iamaleava, defensive back Cole Martin and linebacker Samuel Omosigho join Chesney during Big Ten football media days.
It’s Chesney’s first chance to meet the national and regional media covering the Big Ten. He is naturally an exceptional public speaker and inevitably will be compared to his predecessor, who went viral for his difficulty the first time he stepped into the Big Ten spotlight.
It’s not a fair comparison, but Chesney is sure to score high marks despite a healthy amount of cynicism among Big Ten blue bloods and whispers throughout the league that UCLA’s high 2027 recruiting ranking is a bit inflated. Perhaps that’s the biggest compliment for UCLA, going from being ignored or laughed at to taking a few jabs over your glowing reviews.
Shortly after UCLA returns from media days, the team will kick off preseason camp. We’ll start to get a closer look at the Bruins’ offseason weight room progress and the team will work to prepare for a deceptively difficult opener at California, another long overlooked team with considerable hype entering the 2026 season.
Betts shines in Canada
Sienna Betts showed she’s ready to step into her older sister Lauren’s formidable shoes during a women’s basketball exhibition game against Canada.
The Bruins lost 69-55 to the Canadian national team Wednesday, but Sienna Betts looked like a formidable focal point of the UCLA attack.
She finished with 20 points, 12 rebounds and two blocks.
Betts got valuable but limited minutes last season as Lauren Betts, Gabriela Jaquez and Angela Dugalic dominated the paint for the national champions.
Canada and UCLA did not have their full rosters available for the tune-up, with Bruins Timea Gardiner, K.K. Bransford, Somto Okafor and Lina Jerkovic missing the game.
The excursion gave a heavily overhauled UCLA roster a chance to face different and formidable competition before setting off on sight-seeing adventures, a team bonding opportunity that likely will mean more to the coaching staff than the final score.
UCLA alums win AUSL title
Bruins alum Jadelyn Allchin won Athletes Unlimited Softball League championship MVP honors after helping lead her team to its second consecutive AUSL title.
UCLA softball great Lisa Fernandez is the Talons’ general manager. Her roster and the entire league is packed with former Bruins who are helping AUSL grow at a rapid rate.
Connor Dullinger offered a great look at the role the Bruins have played in the growth of pro softball and explains why Fernandez is thinking bigger, pushing for global gains so that softball can be a permanent fixture at the Olympics.
Do you have a comment or something you’d like to see in a future UCLA newsletter? Email newsletters editor Houston Mitchell at houston.mitchell@latimes.com. To get this newsletter in your inbox, click here.
New UCLA football coach Bob Chesney has won over cynics with his unflinching optimism and attention to detail.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
The new football coach has infused the completely rebuilt program into a place so energetic, his players run around sharing their inspiration to complete strangers.
“Yeah, we’re gonna win here,” Chesney says.
This shared spirit starts every morning in this building, in the team meeting room, where Chesney orders his players to stand and sing the school fight song as if they are standing on the field after a victory.
The words to the song are displayed on a giant screen, which increasingly isn’t used because most of his players have now learned the song by heart. Those who fail to sing get tagged with a red laser pointer, so pretty much everyone croons.
“I’m not gonna let people put limits on us,” Chesney says. “I’m not gonna let them tell us what we can and can’t do.”
“People say why here?” Chesney says. “I say, why not here?”
He shows up for my early afternoon visit last week dressed uniquely for a $33.75 million coach of a Big Ten school on the outskirts of Hollywood.
He is dressed like a player. Black shirt, black shorts, thin sheen of sweat adorning his expressive forehead.
“Been lifting weights,” he says.
Are weight machines set aside for the coaches?
“Lifting with the players,” he says. “These guys are telling me what to do.”
UCLA coach Bob Chesney stands on the field in between players and shouts instructions during a spring practice.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Full disclosure: I arranged my visit full of skepticism about this guy that has UCLA fans swooning.
C’mon. Seriously? He’s ready for this? How can he be ready for this?
The son of a small-town high school football coach in Pennsylvania coal country, Chesney had risen from obscurity to … more obscurity. He had previously coached at four different small schools you couldn’t find on a map. Salve Regina? Assumption? What?
This will be Chesney’s first shot under the bright lights. And he is taking that shot with a program whose best shots couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.
The Bruins have not been to the Rose Bowl game in 28 years, and he is going to fix that? They have not won a Rose Bowl game in 41 years, and he was going to change that culture?
The celebrated Chip Kelly couldn’t do it. The emotional Jim Mora Jr. couldn’t do it. The cheerleading Rick Neuheisel couldn’t do it. The cerebral Karl Dorrell couldn’t do it. The affable Bob Toledo thought he had done it until his team inexplicably quit on him just 60 minutes from a berth in the national championship game.
I had covered all of these coaches, hearing their annual promises, seeing their annual collapses, realizing USC had a stranglehold on the college football money and attention in this town, and I had come up with an inescapable conclusion.
What Chesney is trying to do with UCLA football can’t be done.
Then I met him.
The best word to describe initial impressions of the 48-year-old former college safety would be, wow.
He talks fast. He oozes belief. He sells UCLA. He sells himself. He doesn’t shrink from his giant task. He doesn’t rationalize or equivocate his team’s sordid history.
He’s like one of those charming smart kids who never takes no for an answer.
“I feel it,” he says.”I feel it.”
No wonder his recruiting has been phenomenal, ranked seventh nationwide for the class of 2027, a trend that began this summer with 42 transfers, many of whom will start. No wonder he has been recognized by fans while hanging out in West Hollywood or Griffith Observatory or Dodger Stadium, where he’s already sat wide-eyed in a meeting with Dodger manager and UCLA grad Dave Roberts and Sandy Koufax.
He feels it, and the Bruin Nation feels it with him.
“Everybody’s included,” he says. “You wanna be included? C’mon, you’re included.”
As the self-proclaimed driver of the Bruin bandwagon in recent years — only to be derailed by midseason every time — I’ll pass on the inclusion. I’ve got to see it before buying it. But right now, Chesney has worked me up into such a lather that, yeah, I’m believing.
First, Chesney points to his resume, a litany of small schools who accumulated big victories, a dossier that includes only one losing season and none in the last seven years.
His head coaching career started at Division III Salve Regina (Rhode Island), where he turned eight consecutive losing seasons into three straight winning seasons.
“‘You can’t win there, nobody can win there’ is what they said,” Chesney says. “We won there.”
James Madison coach Bob Chesney and running back Wayne Knight celebrate after winning the Sun Belt championship on Dec. 5 in Harrisonburg, Va.
(Robert Simmons / Associated Press)
Then there was Division II Assumption in Massachusetts, where he took a team that had two winning records in 17 years and led them to five consecutive winning records and three straight playoff appearances.
“They said, ‘You can’t do it, nobody can do it,’’’ Chesney says. “We did it.”
Then there was Holy Cross, also in Massachusetts, where he took the team to a record five straight Patriot League championships while advancing as deep as the FCS quarterfinals.
“They told us, ‘The academics are too tough, the tuition is too high, you can’t win there,’’’ Chesney recounts. “We won there.”
Finally there was James Madison in Virginia, where he took a team whose stars had all followed Curt Cignetti to Indiana and still triumphed, leading them to a Cinderella appearance in the College Football Playoff.
“A lot of people doubted it, a lot of people didn’t believe it could work,” Chesney says. “We’ve proved a lot of people wrong throughout the years.”
After his resume, Chesney points to his surroundings. He is more awed by UCLA’s gravitas than any other football coach I can remember. It’s clear he can sell the school because he has such respect for the school.
“Here you’re a handshake away from changing your life … the school has an 8% acceptance rate, you’re walking around this campus with valedictorians and future CEOs and doctors and lawyers,” he says. “You’re surrounded by greatness, you have a chance to breathe this rare air that very few people get a chance to breathe.”
But for Chesney to fill this air with a football championship requires a price. It is a price that, so far, many potential donors have been reluctant to pay. But in today’s college football world, it is the cost of doing business.
Face it, Cignetti couldn’t have changed Indiana’s fortunes so rapidly if it wasn’t for Mark Cuban money. Chesney believes he can do the same thing here … with a little push.
Longtime UCLA donor Angelo Mazzone chipped in $10 million recently, and more such gifts are needed for UCLA to be able to pay the players that bring them a championship.
”There’s a major financial commitment that comes with getting those four- and five-star kids, but we can really turn the tables with that kind of help,” Chesney says. “Every single thing that is needed is here, we just have to make sure we get the support from the people on the outside that we need to actualize our dream.”
UCLA coach Bob Chesney shares his vision for the program during his introductory news conference on Dec. 9.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
He’s doing all the right things while chasing that dream.
Even as his bosses are pushing to move the team out of the Rose Bowl to SoFi Stadium, he loves the Rose Bowl, and took his team there for its spring game on a weekend that began with him standing outside the brightly lit marquee with his father and his son in the dark.
“It was one of those moments, I was like, man, the history of this place … to me to play in the Rose Bowl, what an honor and a privilege,” he says.
The game actually drew a decent spring crowd of 10,000-12,000, partially because Chesney had worked so hard at banging the drum. He and his players even brought pizzas to various campus groups in hopes of enlisting support.
“You want to be around this program, you can be around this program,” he says.
Then there’s his opinion of USC. He doesn’t have one. He never mentions them. For a UCLA coach, this is a good thing.
“I guess we’re perceived to be in their shadow, and for whatever reasons we weren’t an option the last couple of years, but look at our recruiting, I know we’re becoming an option for L.A. again,” Chesney says. “I think you can change a lot of people’s opinions on who they want to be rooting for.”
As in all levels of football, it all comes down to the quarterback, and Chesney had his first win by convincing budding star Nico Iamaleava. The kid was roundly criticized in this space for holding out and then walking out on his Tennessee team last year, but he has since grown up, and could be the sort of game-changer that Chesney requires.
“Watching Nico with his athletic ability, his arm, creating plays after the play with his legs, I have very high hopes,” says Chesney.
There are potentially outstanding transfers at half of the positions, and, with some solid returning players — this is a team that beat seventh-ranked Penn State, remember — the Bruins have a decent foundation.
UCLA coach Bob Chesney pats running back Anthony Woods on the helmet during the team’s spring game at the Rose Bowl on May 2.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Throw in a favorable 2026 schedule that doesn’t include Ohio State or Penn State or Washington or Iowa, and one thinks they might even have a chance at making some miracles.
“You’re going to see a different brand of football, one that is united, that is passionate, that is physical, that is tough, that has a lot of fun playing together,” he said.
You’re also going to hear a sound that died in the brief DeShaun Foster era, a sound that has never lasted more than a couple of weeks in the last 30 years.
That rumble is the Bruin football bandwagon. It’s revving up again. The inimitable force that is Bob Chesney wants to include you on the start of its journey.
