Coaching Clinic Helps UCLA's Chesney Continue Relationship-Building

One of the most important aspects of taking over and running a college football program is relationship-building. As a head coach, you are constantly under a microscope, answering to key university stakeholders, fans, and others around the school and the team.

Of course, it's important to maintain those relationships within the program, but it's even more crucial for these coaches to build a rapport within the high school community. UCLA's Bob Chesney has emphasized building, and in some cases mending, relationships with those programs.

How Chesney Is Building Relationships

ucla footbal — Dec 9, 2025; Los Angeles, CA, USA; Bob Chesney is introduced as UCLA Bruins football coach at press conference at Renee Luskin Conference Center Centennial Ballroom. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-Imagn Images | Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

As an East Coast guy who has taken the reins of a West Coast program, Bob Chesney considers the relationship aspect immensely crucial, especially if he wants to build a sustainable contender. Not only is there a wealth of football talent in Southern California and the state as a whole, but he'll also need the coaches and leaders of the high school program to trust that sending their players to him is in their best interest.

The simplest way is to do what most coaches do: use off days and parts of the offseason to schedule trips throughout local and national recruiting areas to spend time visiting with recruits and coaches. But even then, with so many people involved, it can be difficult to build those bonds on a personal level.

Chesney also helped UCLA host a coaches clinic on Friday to get to know them better and so they could get to know him. It drew 180 total coaches from three different states.

"It's really important for us to start some of these relationships," Chesney explained. "People said, 'You're coming from the East Coast. How do you build relationships?' Well, you've got to start them. I thought we did a good job on the road throughout the spring, and now having all these guys here is really important."

Going along with these relationships is being available, or as Chesney puts it, "access." He wants everyone to understand what his program is about, but at the same time, make himself and the UCLA program more accessible to the high school football community than they have been.

"We've said from Day 1 that they'll have access to practices," Chesney continued. "They'll have access to meetings. They'll have access to just getting a feel for how we do things because that's going to be important for them to understand our development process, for them to trust us and understand what type of program their player will be going into."

The offseason and spring football are the perfect times to be doing these types of things. In the busy world of college athletics, building and maintaining these high school relationships can be a challenge. During the season, you have games to prepare for and play, and in UCLA's case, there's the added wrinkle that very few members of the new staff have established relationships in the area.

As a first-year coach at UCLA, Chesney is still in the early phases of building those relationships. But the more he gets himself out there, the better chance the Bruins will have of landing top-tier talent and becoming a premier destination.

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