LOS ANGELES -- After a high-energy first spring practice on Thursday, April 2, UCLA head coach Bob Chesney was honest about his team’s level of enthusiasm.
“It’s day one, so you expect that,” he said. “It’s like everybody talks about, what about day five, six, seven, eight, you know? Right in the middle of that. You get to nine, 10, 11, you’re on the other side of it. I want every day, [we] keep doing this.”
Two weeks later, those concerns have manifested themselves. This week features the aforementioned practices six through eight, and Chesney noticed the COLLEGEdip in energy. The difference first became apparent during practice on Tuesday, in small but noticeable ways.
“I didn’t see many steps backwards from anybody today. I just saw that there was just a little bit of a lull, [compared to] what they were bringing the other days,” Chesney told reporters after that practice. “And we’ll check the GPS stuff and see how the volume, the intensity, everything was, you know, physiologically. But ultimately, to me, it just felt like a little bit of a dip.”
The Bruins players concurred with Chesney’s view, and spent much of Thursday’s practice rededicating themselves to find the same level of energy from earlier practices.
“We were a little sloppy at times, but our energy was pretty good,” wide receiver Landon Ellis said. “It’s always about how you recover from a day like that. How do you respond? Which is the name of the game, because it’s all peaks and valleys in football.”
The practice did not naturally offer as much voltage as those that opened the spring session, and as such featured a more conscious effort to keep the players at attention. They did up-downs after an unsatisfactory response to one of Chesney’s instructions. The head coach also encouraged noise and chatter during one special teams drill.
After one particular rep, Chensey turned to tight end Brayden Loftin and linebacker Drew Spinogatti and told them simply, “Gotta talk.” When they told him that they had been talking, he encouraged them to talk louder.
For all of Chesney’s efforts, the players also stated their desire to focus their efforts inward and work on finding energy from themselves rather than outside sources.
“This all has to be natural,” linebacker Samuel Omosigho said. “The players have to buy in, because if the players [don’t] have energy, the coaches can’t bring it out of you. So the players are buying in, and having the players buy in just makes it so much more fun.”
On the offensive side of the ball, Ellis is looking not only to specific players in his unit but to the defensive group as an example.
“I can’t speak for the defense, but they always have a lot of energy,” he said. “So we want to bring that defensive mentality over to the offense. And there’s guys like [wide receivers] Semaj [Morgan] and Mikey Matthews and [quarterback Nico Iamaleava] that have that fire in them every day, and they bring that juice, and it needs to reflect the entire offense.”
UCLA has seven more practices before the spring game, in which to get that energy back up to the level where it started.