Ben Stroup

Bob Chesney Senior is 76 and he's in the UCLA football building early in the morning and he's still in there at night. He's in the staff meetings. He works with the DL. He's got no title, he's not on the payroll and nobody ever asked him to come. The players call him Coach Senior. He got there this summer and has been there since. His son is the head coach. UCLA are 5th in the country this week (first time they've been in the top 10 since October 2001) and they're 8 and 0. Now back up 26 years. Bob Chesney grew up in Kulpmont, PA (population at last census 2,758). It was a coal town, with a corner store and a bar on pretty much every block and a social life that went through the clubs, the Knights of Columbus, the VFW and the American Legion and the Polish and Irish clubs. His dad coached at the Catholic high school. So did his uncle. So did his grandfather. Chesney was the ball boy before he was old enough to play. His parents couldn't afford his schooling so he went back home in the summer and worked. Some summers that was doing the landscaping. Some summers it was at the mine. 'The toughest one was mining coal.' "Back in Kulpmont that's what you did." Years later as a young assistant at Johns Hopkins (making around $28k) he was sharing a 4 bedroom house with his future wife and two roommates and was tending bar at a club in Baltimore at night (four or five hundred a shift). "Got me through those years." He started out as a graduate assistant at a DIII school in 2000. Then Delaware Valley. Then King's College. Then Johns Hopkins. Then head coaching jobs at Salve Regina, Assumption, Holy Cross and James Madison. 8 conference titles. A career record of 132 and 52. Martin Jarmond (the AD who hired him) put it in seven words. "Everywhere he's been he's turned it around." Be absolutely clear about what his father actually watched, as it wasn't anything quick and it was by no means glamorous. Bob Senior saw all 26 years of it from the very start and that's how he describes it. He did it one rung at a time. He didn't skip a single one. A 76 year old man who coached high school football in a coal town is now standing on a practice field in LA with no title and no pay at all, just watching his son coach the 5th best team in the country. I do get choked up about it. I'm an emotional guy. Somebody asked Chesney what the best bit about having his dad there was. "Well that he is my dad."