At some job sites in West Los Angeles, a day with the boss away is a perfectly good excuse to slack off and be lazy.
That wasn’t the case at Spaulding Field on Friday for the UCLA football team.
“I didn’t notice anything,” defensive line coach Inoke Breckterfield said. “I thought we had a great practice. They knew that he wasn’t going to be here, but that wasn’t going to stop us from putting our work in.”
“He” is head coach Rick Neuheisel, who missed Friday’s practice to attend the funeral of former UCLA coach Homer Smith along with several of his former Bruin teammates. The practice was jointly run by offensive coordinator Mike Johnson and defensive coordinator Joe Tresey.
For a pair of coordinators in their first few months with the program, that may be a little disconcerting on the surface but Tresey is pleased with the progress he’s seen in his short tenure with the Bruins.
“We feel better every day,” he said. “It’s an evolution. It’s going to take time as we go into May and June, and they come into the office to build relationships and understand personalities and backgrounds, but we’re really pleased right now.”
Anyone who has watched Tresey coaching over the last three weeks would likely be shocked to hear that he’s building relationships with any of his players. He can be seen berating a different player every day for any number of issues he notices.
Friday’s target was rising redshirt sophomore cornerback Brandon Sermons. Sermons was out of position during a team drill and he, along with the rest of the crowd in attendance, heard about it.
But what many people didn’t see was Tresey taking Sermons aside after his tirade to calmly explain what went wrong.
“I do that with quite a few guys,” Tresey said. “You never let them leave the field with their tail between their legs. You’ve always got to bring them up before they get out of here or you see them in the locker room, but you don’t let them leave without them knowing that you care about them and what the situation was and how it happened.”
Linebacker Sean Westgate, one of six seniors on the roster, embraces Tresey’s “tough love” approach.
“You can’t play football and be sensitive,” said Westage, last season’s second leading tackler. “We don’t have enough time for you to be sensitive. We don’t have enough time for anybody to take it personally because it’s not. It’s all about getting better.”