Onwards and Upwards
Lessons from the past, still ringing true today.
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
I don’t hang many things up in my classroom. Call it a natural extension of my inability to decorate, if you will. There are some government posters here and there, and a wall with all the presidents on it, as is tradition in every social science classroom. I have a wall of pennants from a variety of colleges I’ve collected over the years, sent by friends and family, so that their particular alma mater could be represented.
At the front of the class, right above the whiteboard, are three quotes which would be instantly familiar to any UCLA fan:
“Never mistake activity for achievement.”
“Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.”
“It is what we learn after we know it all that really counts.”
It almost feels cliché to display these Wooden-isms in a classroom, but those words still ring true today. They’re a constant reminder to students to constantly reach for a higher standard, to never accept settling for less when you can accomplish more. 15 years after his death, the words of John Wooden remain prescient, even as the world he lived in drifts further and further away.
Life is all about pushing forward and striving for something better. We all embark on this journey, and though the path may not look the same for everyone, we are all trying to get as close to that goal as possible. Sometimes the road is rocky, and sometimes it is paved, but we walk forward just the same. But the ones who find success in their journey are the ones who can battle that adversity, who do not settle when things get tough, but instead push through to create something even better.
I had plans for the offseason. Big plans. I was going to write about football and basketball and baseball and so many different UCLA things that I never get to write about during the season. But then two different things happened, one of which was self-inflicted and one inflicted upon me.
The self-inflicted event was that I moved into a new apartment with my girlfriend. Part of this was happenstance - my other roommates were planning to leave our place of four years, and I can’t afford the rent on a 4-bedroom townhouse by myself - but it also felt right in the moment. It still feels right. Honestly, I couldn’t be happier with the situation.
But no one tells you how busy you become when you move, especially when you are combining two different apartments into one. We did our move in stages, which allowed my girlfriend to continue working while I was on summer break, but it also stretched out the moving process well beyond what one would think is reasonable. Every day turned monotonous, as I would wake up, load my car with some boxes, and drive them to the new place. Sometimes we would mix things up and go look at new furniture (we bought a new sofa and I love it) or pay for movers to grab the big heavy items, but this process lasted over a month.
The other thing they don’t tell you about moving is that the move never truly stops. There are still boxes that have not been unpacked despite the move being “finished” for a month now; there are still pieces of furniture we want to buy, and pieces of furniture that we are trying to get rid of. There are whole rooms that still need to be organized, and whole rooms that need to be reorganized because the first organization effort just wasn’t up to the desired quality. Rooms need to be painted, and then painted again just to be sure.
Suffice it to say, the process was physically draining and left little time to relax since any downtime was being spent searching for a new job.
Oh yeah. The other thing that happened to me this offseason.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
College football has been in a constant state of flux for the past decade.
The game is, in many ways, unrecognizable from where it was a decade ago. The opening of the Transfer Portal and the arrival of Name, Image, and Likeness payments have changed the way teams build their rosters and, in turn, have made it tougher for the average fan to connect with a program over a longer period of time. Take UCLA, for example; it is easier to count how many projected starters came to the school as freshmen than it is to count the number of transfers. Players do not have the same loyalty to a school that they did in the past, and in turn, schools have laid bare that they did not have much loyalty to the players to begin with. The game is no longer a game but a business.
It should be noted that it could have been different. The NCAA and its member institutions have long known that these changes were coming, ever since O’Bannon v. NCAA had an initial ruling way back in 2014. It’s been open season on the NCAA ever since, as everyone has come around to the idea that the NCAA was operating in a way that was taking advantage of players. When even the Supreme Court is taking the time to issue 9-0 rulings against you, with various justices taking the opportunity to hit windmill dunks against your argument, it’s a pretty good sign that you need to change some things.
We’re in this situation because the NCAA saw the train coming and instead of doing sensible things like being proactive and creating guardrails and systems to make the transition smoother for everyone, they did what they usually do: cross their arms and throw a hissy fit. Eventually, the train ran them over, as trains are wont to do. Everyone realized that the emperor had no clothes and that they could do whatever they wanted.
The visuals of the sport have changed as well. The regionality that was a major selling point has been sanded down into unrecognizable blobs. UCLA and some of its longtime partners now belong to a midwestern conference centered around Chicago and Indianapolis. The Atlantic Coast Conference has members touching the Pacific Ocean. The Big 12, which prided itself on its Texas and Plains roots, now stretches from West Virginia to Arizona. Even SEC fans grumble about having non-Southern members in Missouri and Texas. Money is the driving force, as it is in everything these days.
But even despite all that, despite a shifting landscape and constant rule changes and roster churn, there is still the football. And the football remains good.
Sometimes in life, we miss the forest for the trees. We focus on all the small problems that seem like big ones in the moment, and we forget the overwhelming positives that are taking place. That’s how I feel about college football at the moment. I can lament the loss of regionality in the sport, or how hard it is to connect to the players, but when I sit down and watch Iowa State and Kansas State kick off the season in Dublin, I can’t help but be sucked back in.
Football is intrinsically beautiful to me. It is a game of struggle, of teams trying desperately to overcome an obstacle and come out on top. There is inherent beauty in the choreographed dance the two teams participate in; the offense and defense locked in a never-ending chess match where advantages can be gained but only for an instant. When your team wins, the feeling is euphoric, and when they lose, it is heartwrenching. But even in defeat, there is a sense of hope that a team can learn from its failures and get better.
One of the most famous quotes in U.S. Presidential history is about college football. John F. Kennedy, in discussing plans to build a space program, threw in an ad-libbed line about the hosts of his speech.
But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Every team, no matter how big or how small, dreams of greatness. They fight and struggle and strive towards an established ideal. And we are entering a new era where that dream season is more attainable than ever. Just consider last season’s College Football Playoffs. Boise State fought for decades for national recognition and was able to carve out a spot. Southern Methodist, left for dead by an uncaring NCAA that punished the school for being too loud about their cheating, finally returned to national relevance. Indiana, long a doormat in the college football pecking order, put together a dream season for the ages. The path to a great season is more attainable than ever, and for as much as things like the Transfer Portal and NIL have made things harder for the average fan, they’ve also served to spread out talent throughout the country and make for a more even playing field. Ohio State may win it all, but that doesn’t mean the little guy can’t party as well.
Let me give the tl;dr version of what happened. I’d been teaching at the same school for the past five years, and in the past year, the financial troubles of the school started to come to the surface. Over the past year, we shifted into fight mode, changing out our school board and sitting in tons of meetings with the state to prove we could be financially secure going forward, all while trying to carry on with students as if everything was fine. The mental stress of the year was immense; there were times when we had teacher development meetings that devolved into tears. But at the beginning of May, we saw the bright light: the state had decided we had shown everything necessary to continue operating, and that our budget was healthy once again. All the blood, sweat, and tears had paid off.
And then we got the rug pulled out from under us, as we were affected by the federal funding cuts to education. Just like that, a giant hole was blown into our budget with no hope of filling it.
When a school is on the verge of closing, the people involved go through the five stages of grief in a very public way. In some ways, those stages were obvious: the depression that hung over the school those last few weeks was inescapable, especially as students came to terms with the fact that they’d be attending school somewhere else in the fall, away from their friends and the teachers with whom they’d developed such a strong bond. Some teachers continued on as if everything was going to work out fine, while others lashed out at anyone and everyone that they could. There were multiple rounds of bargaining, as staff tried to see if there was a way to rebudget the next year to account for a $500k hole in the budget, and then eventually started bargaining for new jobs at the schools that were seeking to bring our students in.
When the acceptance phase came, it hit like a ton of bricks. Graduation became a surreal moment, as every speaker seemed to independently understand that they were no longer saying their goodbyes to the graduating class, but to the school itself. The ceremony turned into a eulogy, and the post-graduation meet-and-greet in the quad turned into a celebration of life for a school that had meant so much to the community. We often joked that there was no school like Academia Avance, but in that moment, it became clear just how true that statement was.
All that said, becoming unemployed right when you’re on the verge of moving into a new apartment with your significant other may not have been the best situation for my mental state. For as tired as I was physically from the move, I was three times as mentally and emotionally drained from the situation I was now in. I tried my best to hide it, but each day I was a panicked mess, especially as days turned into weeks and interviews continued to not lead to job offers. The job market for teachers has stagnated in recent years, but with the looming education cuts at the national level, those prospects have gotten even worse. Throw in that I am a social science teacher, a position that rarely sees turnover compared to other subjects, and things looked more grim. There were multiple instances where I would apply for a job at a district, only to find out weeks later that the district decided not to hire anyone at all and just eliminated the position to save money.
Days turned into weeks turned into months as I waited. I had trouble sleeping for most of it, spending most of my nights worrying about what the next day would bring, whether something new would happen, or if I would be rejected again. There were a lot of days when I would just sit on my phone and scroll through TikTok or YouTube just to find something, anything to distract me from the situation. I was constantly losing motivation to do anything; if anything, I dragged out our move longer than I should have because I did not want to do more work than was necessary.
UCLA athletics, and in turn this blog, became secondary.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
This is a UCLA blog; you expect UCLA content, so here you go.
If there is a theme of this offseason, it is that UCLA was a beneficiary (victim?) of circumstance. The program rebuilt the coaching staff in the offseason and took a gamble on a lot of different transfers because that’s what you do when you’re a rebuilding team with no track record of success. Spring practice was full of a lot of intriguing pieces, but nothing that stood out as a game-changer. That’s because the real game changer was sitting at home getting ready to make a decision.
The transfer of Nico Iamaleava very much reads like a “right place, right time” situation for UCLA. We’ll never get the true story for his transfer - Tennessee sources state that Nico went to the school asking for more money, the school declined, and so Nico left, while Nico and his family are adamant that he’s moving home to be closer to family - but the result is that a quarterback with CFP experience was suddenly available for cheap, and UCLA was the only logical destination. I don’t think Nico comes here if he leaves in January, and I don’t think he comes here if any team was actually willing to come close to meeting the alleged $4 million ask. In fact, I have my doubts as to whether Nico is still UCLA’s quarterback at this point next year (and it’s not because he’s off to the NFL after this one). But at the end of the day, UCLA got to be a beneficiary of this bizarre situation.
The improved recruiting in June follows this same path. UCLA went on a commitment spree that month, getting commitments from 15 different players, including three four-stars per 247Sports Composite (they’ve added two more players, including another four-star, since then). The class currently ranks 23rd in the country, which would be the best mark for UCLA since Chip Kelly held onto Jim Mora’s recruits in 2018. But there’s a pretty good reason for UCLA’s improvement in recruiting, as that burst just happened to coincide with the approval of the House settlement by a judge in early June. UCLA’s NIL operation, particularly for football, remains anemic, so suddenly having access to revenue share funds is a boon for the program and allows it to acquire better talent than it had in the past. But that’s a temporary salve, especially as it has become clear that NIL and collectives are not going away as many believed. A team that wants to compete for talent at the highest level still needs a healthy NIL operation, and UCLA football currently does not have that.
Even this year’s schedule feels like a gift. There are three near-automatic losses on it, sure, but UCLA dodges three other top-end teams in the conference (Oregon, Michigan, and Illinois) and has a lot of winnable games throughout the schedule. There isn’t a meat-grinder opening like last year as well, so the Bruins could theoretically build some positive momentum in the early part of the season if things go their way.
Emphasis on if.
The closer we get to the season, the less confident I am that UCLA can put things together. I think there are too many red flags, from the complete turnover of the defense to Nico’s subpar season playing in one of the easiest offenses around to the media blackout designed to “protect our scheme before we play”. I have a top-end expectation of making a bowl game, but I also think the program is still stuck in the hole left behind by the previous regime, and that this process will take time (even if I remain unconvinced in Foster’s ability to be the one to complete that process).
But that’s not a happy thought, so let me leave you with this:
I don’t know if Deshaun Foster is the answer - like I said, I have my doubts - but what I do know is that it is easier than ever for a program to be upwardly mobile. The spread of talent has enabled teams to turn things around much more quickly than in the past. Maybe that turnaround is this season, or the next, or in a few years under a new regime.
But I do know that better days are ahead. I just can’t tell you when.
My story does have a happy ending.
The apartment is (mostly) in a good place. We got it in a good enough spot to host a combination housewarming and birthday party in the middle of August, and new furniture is still on the way. I have a TV stand coming in next week. The planning for the herb garden on the balcony has begun in earnest.
I painted some walls. I’m colorblind, so I didn’t pick the color, but the actual act of painting was cathartic, and I’m told they look very nice.
At the end of June, I had an interview with a school near my new apartment. The job was ideal on paper, but at the end of the interview, we got to talking about sports and my experience as a coach and assistant athletic director. A few weeks later, I got a call from the school about a second interview, which was weird but not unheard of. As it turns out, the second interview was to see if I would be willing to take on the athletic director position on top of teaching my classes, and the job offer was sitting on the table, ready to go.
So yeah, I’m an athletic director now. Funny how you can go through life offering criticism of people in a position, only to find yourself in that same position later on (albeit on a much smaller scale).
I’m not going to pretend I learned something grandiose or awe-inducing from this experience. My situation was distressingly common in America, and on the grand scale of things that could happen to a person, it is fairly mundane. It was a prolonged period of mental hardship, sure, but it is also in the past now. My only goal now is to move forward and put that struggle in the rearview mirror.
There’s a different Woodenism that’s been sitting in my head these past few weeks. It has become something of a mantra at my new job; a reminder that life will throw all kinds of curveballs at you, and how you choose to move forward speaks more about you than anything else. Onwards and upwards, or as John Wooden said:
Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
- The Journey, by Mary Oliver
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Beautiful article. Happy for you Dimitri!