UCLA coach Bob Chesney works to make Bruins

You compete.

Or you complain.

UCLA head coach Bob Chesney coined it at the start of preseason camp last 12 months in Harrisonburg, Va., before main James Madison to a 12-2 document, a Sun Belt championship and its first College Football Playoff look.

“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, main his new workforce.

The Bruin devoted received its first style of their newly minted head honcho at his introductory news convention on Dec. 9, where he made guarantees of turning around the soccer program, elevating it to its top of the past, and reengaging the Bruin neighborhood.

And Chesney has not wavered since.

From his halftime speech at a UCLA males’s basketball sport versus Indiana — where he proclaimed that the Bruins could be Big Ten champions — to throughout spring follow and all through Big Ten media day last week, Chesney has stayed constant.

And that consistency contains the best way he’s training his gamers main up to UCLA’s opener against California, where the previous Pac-12 rivals will meet for a night time sport between two first-year head coaches.

Chesney has emphasised, throughout his short tenure in Westwood, that while bodily development is crucial in the offseason, the mental facet of the sport carries the same weight. Central to that, is placing gamers in hostile conditions in the offseason to get them battle-tested come sport 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 check his gamers’ resiliency, Chesney has carried out “compete periods” throughout his time in Westwood to emulate the velocity and depth of live reps.

Alongside competitors has been grading all the things a participant does, so there’s no ambiguity as to where a participant stands on the depth chart or in this system.

Outside of the precise drills and workouts Chesney implements, the coach has also purposefully scheduled some of his practices in the afternoon to expose his gamers to the extreme Los Angeles heat — his model of throwing his gamers into the fire to help get them acclimated and check their mental toughness.

Chesney’s mental training in the end serves as a litmus check in discovering who is cut from a different material.

“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 ardour and pleasure emanating from gamers on the first day of fall camp, and less than a month away from the first sport of the season, Chesney highlighted that it’s about placing a stability: testing his gamers’ resolve but also not being reactionary.

The new head coach underscored that it may be straightforward for impulse and emotion to take over, but uplifting one another and letting errors refine you quite than outline 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, notably within the same place group, celebrating the success of one another quite 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 requested.

“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 is not going to play its first sport until Sept. 5.

However, battles can be received and misplaced within the workforce along the best way.

But to Chesney, it’s how you reply to those successes and failures that prevail.