The Cal State San Bernardino campus, where UCLA will hold a two-week football training camp starting Saturday, sits near historic Route 66, where some of the motels are relics from an age that predates the interstates, the Internet and the insanity of the Bowl Championship Series.
Jim Mora, UCLA's first-year coach, has devised a 1950s-style black-and-white camp to match, saying, "It's going to be hard. It's going to be tough. Yeah, it's going to be hot. Yeah, we're going to push them."
Most teams settle for throwback uniforms.
Mora says he's "not re-creating the Junction Boys," a reference to Bear Bryant's first Texas A&M team that spent 10 days in sunstroke heat preparing for the 1954 season. But his intent seems similar.
"Coach Bryant was trying to figure out what kind of team he had," former Texas A&M lineman Dennis Goehring said. "He was trying to get the best out of us, even if it meant doing things we didn't want to do."
Bryant's camp ended when lineman Billy Schroeder nearly died in the heat.
San Bernardino is expected to be less extreme, both in temperature and treatment. But Mora, like Bryant, is trying to figure out his team.
The Bruins are 81-80 since the 1998 season, when they last appeared in the Rose Bowl. Change seems overdue. A change of scenery was a start.
San Bernardino may not be the outpost Junction, Texas, was in 1954, but any town Wyatt Earp once called home is far from the comfy, cosmopolitan Westwood scene.
San Bernardino's third-ranked restaurant, according to TripAdvisor.com, is Souplantation. But at least it's ranked. UCLA's football team hasn't been since 2007, a 78-week absence from the polls that is the longest stretch in program history.
"Coach Mora wants us out of our comfort zone," running back Johnathan Franklin said. "I hear it's going to be 105 degrees every day."
Not so, said linebacker Damien Holmes, who played at nearby Colton High. Still, he said, "I don't know how many degrees more it is than Westwood, but it's that and much, much more."
Challenging camp sites seem to be a trend with first-year coaches around the Pac-12 Conference. Washington State's Mike Leach is keeping the Cougars home, but Pullman is already a patch in the middle of nowhere. Others are hitting the back roads.
Arizona, under Rich Rodriguez, is off to Cochise College, a map dot just north of the Mexican border that makes San Bernardino look like Las Vegas. Arizona State Coach Todd Graham is taking the Sun Devils back to Tontozona, an isolated mountain retreat north of Phoenix where teams guided by the legendary Frank Kush were toughened up.
Said Graham: "Cellphones don't work there, what a blessing for me."
Back in '54, Bryant also sought isolation. The result: Two buses went in; one came out.
"It was kind of like boot camp," Goehring recalled. "You went through it trying not to get your butt shot off."
Players were carted off on stretchers. Only 35 came back. More than 50 quit, some slipping away in the middle of the night.
Others dreamed about alternatives.
On the bus ride down the hill to the practice field, Gene Stallings said he thought, "If the brakes would just fail." That, he said, "would be a way out without having to quit."
View the original article here
This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.
No comments:
Post a Comment