The Wasserman Football Center at UCLA will look a little different before the start of next season.
As the media gathered to enter the elevator prior to head coach DeShaun Foster’s press conference Thursday, a sign on the nearby door to the weight room read that renovations are underway until May 21.
Foster confirmed that it was “time to upgrade a little bit.” The building opened in 2017.
“Just a little bit,” Foster said, not offering too many details on the changes underway.
But there are more changes on the way, too.
Foster announced that grass will be installed on Spaulding Field in time for the start of the season in late August.
Later in the day, the Los Angeles Times reported that it will be “in addition to a turf area” that the Bruins currently practice on.
So what was Foster’s thinking behind the surface upgrade?
“We just have turf, we need grass. We play on grass,” Foster said, alluding to the Rose Bowl home stadium in Pasadena. “I don’t like playing on surfaces that we’re not playing on that week, you know?”
The installation will be done after fall camp, with the Bruins spending roughly two weeks of camp away from campus at a location to be announced later.
“It will be some familiar place for you, for some of you guys,” Foster hinted. “Not real familiar, so not somewhere we’ve been before.”
Foster even joked that it would be an indoor facility before conceding that it will be outdoors and breaking out in laughter.
The decision to practice off campus was something Foster hoped to do last year, his first season at the helm, but the planning and coordination didn’t line up given the timing of his hire.
Instead, UCLA players stayed in a hotel in Woodland Hills but were transported back to campus for practice early during last year’s fall camp.
Now, though, Foster said he has his full plan in place in an effort to simulate his past experience of an NFL training camp environment.
“I just relate it to pro ball and how we come together,” Foster said. “Training camp is really a time that the team comes together, and I just think that being off-site that helps. It helps the camaraderie, it just helps guys lock in, and you kind of just become friends and befriend guys that you normally wouldn’t talk to or be around. I visualize training camp off-site, guys coming together, then we come back and take on the world.”
The Bruins will close spring camp Saturday with practice No. 15 serving as the spring showcase at the Rose Bowl. Parking in Lot H opens at 10 a.m. before the gates open an hour later.
The practice gets underway at 2 p.m. Admission is free, and fans can RSVP in advance online.
