Filling the glass

Do you see the excitement bubbling from the players affecting the older coaches? Is it almost a trickle-up effect?
UCLA head coach Rick Neuheisel: “Bob and Norm, and I don’t mean old-school because of their age, but they’re from a school of thought that is prove it. Prove it to me. They’re not going to overload their backsides with their mouths. That’s not who they are. I’m from a slightly different place. You have to picture it, you have to talk about the finished product, so that everyone knows where we’re going. Relentlessly positive, it’s an action. It’s not just that the glass is half full. I want to make the glass be half full. I’m going to force it. If I have to go find the water, I’m going to. We’re going to find a way. We think about it all the time, and we have to do that. Now there’s a bunch of kids from this class who think everything’s wonderful. They don’t know why, but they think everything’s wonderful. There’s a balance to all of it. All of us want good things to happen, but you need people who say there’s no such thing as a good day, people who are going to extract the energy and demand and never say it was good enough so that you keep getting there. Then you need the people who are pressing and making you dream with your feet on the ground. Here’s the action that’s going to get us the dream we all have. I mean, you talk to my recruits, and every one of them would say we’re going to the Rose Bowl. There would be no question in their mind that we’re going to the Rose Bowl. They would say this year. But I want them with that optimism, that pie-in-the-eye, lets-go-get-it-done attitude, devil-may-care.”