Friday morning’s practice signals the official start of Bronco Mendenhall’s sixth preseason camp as the head football coach at Virginia. That that practice will take place on the new grass fields behind the McCue Center is just one indication of how much has changed at UVa since Mendenhall and his staff arrived from BYU in December 2015.

UVa fans have watched the program grow from the days of “Hoos Rising” to “The New Standard” to now #TheStandard. They’ve seen the Wahoos make three consecutive bowl appearances, end the program’s long losing streak against Virginia Tech, win a Coastal Division title, and compete in an ACC title game. But it all began with Mendenhall stripping his new players of their V-Sabres and jersey numbers and forcing them to earn their way into the weight room and onto the practice field.

Those exercises—and program mantras like “Earned, Not Given” and “Will Before Skill”—are standard procedure at Virginia now, but for the players on that 2016 team that first preseason under Mendenhall was anything but. From winter workouts in plain black T-shirts and a memorable brawl at one spring practice, to an emotional night picking numbers and an unannounced visit from a pro wrestler to do some yoga, that first preseason may not have led to the on-field success that fall that the Hoos were anticipating, but it laid the foundation of where Mendenhall’s program sits five years later.

Here's the last of our three-part series, Setting the Standard: An Oral History of Bronco's Arrival at UVa. You can check out the first part here and the second part here.

When Bronco Mendenhall made the jump to Virginia, he didn’t come alone. More than a half dozen members of Mendenhall’s BYU staff also made the cross-country move: offensive coordinator Robert Anae, defensive coordinator Nick Howell and position coaches Jason Beck, Mark Atuaia, Garett Tujague, Shane Hunter, and Kelly Poppinga. Marques Hagans, the lone holdover from Mike London’s UVa staff, and former East Carolina head coach Ruffin McNeill rounded out Mendenhall’s first group of assistants.

MATT JOHNS (senior quarterback): They were just trying to create a culture of camaraderie and working hard together. In college football, you don't see staffs stay together that much. There's always a lot of turnover. I think that alone told us okay, they are following this guy across the country. And now you look back on it and they've stayed with him for this long, that's pretty special.

CHRIS PEACE (sophomore outside linebacker): It was like a whole new energy for us. It gave us a little bit of hope.

NICHOLAS CONTE (senior punter): One of the only staffs I’ve ever seen or been a part of that ran with you during practice. On certain drills you’re running, you may not even have a ball and you’re just sprinting 30, 40 yards down the field, and they’re running with you. And if you do something well, the coaches are jumping on you and they’re celebrating more than the players on a lot of things. They’re big on positive reinforcement, which is huge from a sports psychology perspective.

JACKSON MATTEO (senior offensive lineman): These guys are bought in fully. Tujague. Hagans. Poppinga. Even they were wearing black shirts at practice, black shirts and black shorts.

MICAH KISER (junior inside linebacker): The thing I always talk about is the sense of family. In the summer we had a Hawaiian barbecue at JPJ one time, I remember. Just stuff like that, it was different. It was a sense of family. And I say this all the time, when you know the coach cares about you, you're gonna play a lot harder.

MATT JOHNS: I think guys wanted to feel like the coaches cared about them, and I think they brought that. We all knew Coach London cared about us. Coach London, I love that guy to death. I'll follow that guy anywhere. But it was just hard because some of those assistants didn't give that toward their players. And everyone has their own coaching style so it is what it is. But it was just different type of energy and family vibe.

DONTE WILKINS (senior defensive tackle): That energy, it’s needed. You don’t think about it until you actually get it. But all that is is the passion that they have for the game of football, and the passion they have for their players and trying to develop them into something that most players don’t even see in themselves. That energy, it’s infectious, it’s what’s needed, it’s what drives this program. And that energy carries over to everybody.

ERIC SMITH (senior offensive lineman): Every coach had their own unique way of drawing players in. I wish I had more time to be around those guys simply because of how much they made me buy in. The family aspect really is what drew me in, and I can vouch for a lot of other guys as well. The energy made it that much more fun to come into the building every day.

MICAH KISER: I still talk to Coach Hunter to this day all the time. Following his wife on Instagram, seeing what his kids are doing. Sending his kids a jersey for Christmas a couple years ago. When you have that sense of love for the people around you, it makes coming in better and you're gonna work harder too.

While his assistants raised the energy level, Mendenhall brought a different presence to the practice field.

ZACH BRADSHAW (senior inside linebacker): His demeanor has always been consistent. He was just brutally honest, and he’s kind of got that stoic shield to him, and he would just say it like it was.

MATT JOHNS: It was efficient and direct. That's the best way to put it. He wasn't gonna say a lot, but when he did say something it was gonna be extremely powerful. That's just the way he operates. It's as direct as it can be. 'This is what it is, this is what you need to do, go do it.’

ZACH BRADSHAW: If we didn’t do something good enough he’d just say, ‘Again.’ And we had to do it again. He never yelled at anyone. I still can probably count on one hand the amount of times he’s raised his voice and gotten in the face of a player. You’re either gonna do it the right way or we’re gonna do it again.

JACKSON MATTEO: In those early stages he was trying to build rapport, but at the same time he's doing his best trying to turn over every stone for the future of the program. He’s doing his best to collaborate with strength and conditioning, and what does 'Earned, Not Given' look like for strength and conditioning. What does that look like for academics. Because when you're the head coach, especially like Bronco when you care for the whole young man, Bronco was collaborating specifically with the departments we touch the most. He was trying to uproot the systems that were there to see if we could do anything in that building better.

QUIN BLANDING (junior free safety): He was tough, and a lot of people couldn't handle that. And that's okay. But the one thing I will say was he was really about his players. He was tough and he stayed true to who he was, he didn't smile much, but when you talked to him you knew he cared.

MATT JOHNS: He'd pull up a clip of, let's say it was Donte Wilkins, and he would show him just working his butt off on film. And then he would look at the team and say, 'Do you think this guy cares?' and everyone would be like, 'Of course. He's a captain, he works his tail off every day and he produces on the field.' He would do things to highlight different players. For myself, those last couple games he said, 'You have earned the right to start so we're gonna start you.' So that was something that, he was sticking to his guns even though the results weren't showing up on the field. He would do things like you'd be walking off the field and he'd put his arm around you tell you what you did good and what you did bad that day. That goes a long way because some head coaches don't have that, they want to keep themselves distant from their players. So I think he keeps a good balance of remaining the leader that he is, but also connecting with the players on a deeper level.

QUIN BLANDING: A lot of the things we did were a bunch of surprises. Like the time we went in the river. We were having a hard week of practice, coach was getting on us like crazy. It was a Saturday practice, and he just came in and was like, 'No practice today. Everybody get dressed and get on the bus.' And we were like, 'What?' He was like, 'I'm proud of you guys, the hard work. We're going to the river today.' Out of nowhere. Most of the time we did things on our own. Not as a team but as certain groups of the team. But he took the whole team and was like, 'We're going.’

CHRIS PEACE: There were so many things we did that year that brought us together. It was something as simple as watching movies at McCue with a whole bunch of wings, him inviting us over to his house, swimming at the pool. Even the positional coaches inviting us over. That was things we never did with the last staff.

Another of those team-building measures introduced by strength and conditioning coach Frank Wintrich the summer before preseason camp was regular group yoga sessions. The workout DVDs, called ‘DDP Yoga,’ were hosted by former professional wrestler ‘Diamond’ Dallas Page.

QUIN BLANDING: 'Diamond' Dallas Page. Yes, sir.

MATT JOHNS: He was the famous wrestler, and we had seen the stories that he had done for people that had lost hundreds of pounds doing this, and essentially making a significant change in their life. And for us it was okay, let's unite around this. It was something that was just fun outside of football that we were all able to connect on.

MICAH KISER: He’s this old guy, probably in his 60s and when you watch how flexible this guy was and how well he could move for how old he was and all the injuries had gone through, you could definitely see the importance of yoga and flexibility. And that's the way the game started going when I was in college. You started seeing the shift to like spread offenses, going fast, being able to play in space, having to be able to run. So just incorporating that into training was important.

DONTE WILKINS: I was a huge wrestling fan growing up, so when we were doing his yoga I thought it was hilarious. The whole team room was filled with guys doing yoga twice a week with DDP Yoga.

QUIN BLANDING: I love the movie Ready to Rumble. It's a wrestling movie. That's how I knew him. I knew him from the movie. And as a kid growing up, I watched wrestling. And then I heard the name and I was like, 'Wait, that's the guy from the movie too!’

JACKSON MATTEO: ’Diamond' Dallas Page is the manliest, funniest, most charismatic, he's kind of like an enigma. You can't really pin him down. He's like tattooed and a wrestler and an athlete, and he mentored Jake 'The Snake', but now he does his own yoga program. So when [Wintrich] first puts him onto the TV in front of us, as 18- to 21-year-old men, we were loving it. We were just dying for this. And it was something we could be goofy together with but actually help us. We would do the 'Bang!' together. We ate it up.

DONTE WILKINS: And then I think Connor Brewer’s mom reached out to him and the rest is history.

JACKSON MATTEO: One day we're in a meeting in fall camp — and you know fall camp can just be so slow and so monotonous and hard — and there's a team meeting, and all of a sudden, 'Yeah, we have a guest speaker tonight, and it's 'Diamond' Dallas Page.’ And he shows up. I have never seen a room of young men go crazier. We rushed his ass. We're going crazy, we all go out on the field and do yoga. It was insane. We rallied around him.

ERIC SMITH: I’ve still got the picture to this day. I think I’m right at the bottom on the ground taking the DDP pose.

MICAH KISER: It was wild. He's very energetic. Him coming in, hearing his story. I want to say he couldn't read above a third grade level, and kind of seeing where he took his life. And how flexible he was, how well he could move for a guy that old who had put his body through a lot doing WWE wrestling, it was cool to see. I actually still follow him on Twitter to this day.

ZACH BRADSHAW: It was hilarious. To have him actually show up unannounced was pretty sweet, and everyone was going crazy. It’s one of those surreal kind of experiences.

The Mendenhall era at UVa officially kicked off on September 3, 2016. Almost 50,000 fans were in the stands at Scott Stadium to watch the Wahoos face Richmond, one of the top five teams in the country in the FCS preseason polls.

CHRIS PEACE: I just remember all that work we put in, it kind of got to our head even before that Richmond game. Like, ‘All right, we worked our ass off so we’re gonna have a good season. We’re gonna have an eight-win, 10-win season for sure.’

ERIC SMITH: You couldn’t have told us we were going no less than 10-2. That’s how thoroughly and genuinely convinced we were. That’s the closest we had ever been; the most camaraderie that we had ever expressed among the team. The hardest we had ever worked. That was the most conditioned and in shape we had ever been. So before the first game, you couldn’t have told us we weren’t gonna take it all.

JACKSON MATTEO: When we arrived at that game, we had been through so much and we trained so hard that we just knew that we would beat them. And once that kickoff was fumbled, I think there was a feeling that everyone had, and it was, 'Uh oh, this could be bad.' And then they marched right down the field and scored, and we were thinking, 'We could lose.’

ZACH BRADSHAW: No offense to Richmond, but that was one of the most embarrassing experiences of my life. Especially because we were so hyped up because the culture has changed, the staff has changed. This is an opportunity for us to start on the right foot, and as any Power 5 team would think playing an FCS opponent, we’re thinking we’re gonna go beat the brakes off these dudes. It was very apparent early on that our lack of depth was gonna be a problem for us.

A pair of early UVa turnovers helped Richmond jump out to a 17-0 lead in the second quarter. The Spiders never looked back, putting up 524 yards of total offense en route to a 37-20 victory. It was Richmond’s first win against the Wahoos since 1946.

DONTE WILKINS: Oh it hurt, man. It hurt. It’s not something that you see happening, but when you look back on it you’re like, ‘Oh, I kind of see how that happened.’

JACKSON MATTEO: After that game it was like, 'Oh shit. We're not as good as we thought, and this is a much longer process.' I think everyone kind of assumed we'd been through the wringer, we paid our dues. The culture is changed. We did it. We did all the work. But that wasn't the case. There's still so much more to this journey.

DONTE WILKINS: I remember we were on the sideline and I was like, ‘Damn, tempo runs for this?’ But it was more than that. Our team kept fighting. We continued to fight through. We weren’t done after the Richmond game. That game sucked. It’ll always suck, being a part of that. But it’s something that we all had to go through. It was a learning experience, definitely.

NICHOLAS CONTE: That was a hard thing to face. But the great thing about that coaching staff was they really brought you back up. You learn from it but you didn’t harp on it. They didn’t get mad at us over it. They didn’t sit there and yell at us over it. We went into meetings, we made corrections, we made adjustments, and we went forward.

MATT JOHNS: You see that they're sticking to what they believe, which is important. They're not changing the message. They're not changing how they're coaching. They're not changing all these philosophies just because we're losing games. They're sticking to their guns.

The Hoos followed that Richmond loss with back-to-back road defeats at Oregon and UConn. Mendenhall’s first UVa win came at home on September 24, when the Cavaliers scored three times in the fourth quarter to beat Central Michigan 49-35. The following week, Jordan Mack’s fourth-quarter strip sack in the end zone for an Eli Hanback touchdown clinched a 34-20 victory at Duke that snapped the program’s 17-game road losing streak. But the Wahoos didn’t win again, dropping seven straight ACC games — capped by an embarrassing 52-10 loss at rival Virginia Tech — to finish the season at 2-10.

ZACH BRADSHAW: We had talent at certain positions but not collectively, I would say. Regardless of who was coaching, it would have been hard for us to be a 10-win team that year. But the messaging kind of switched to ‘Be the foundation for the change that’s going to continue as we move forward.’ Because someone had to be that class, regardless of wins or losses, to try to maintain that culture of accountability and discipline.

MICAH KISER: I would just say that 2-10 season was very humbling. I think that the expectation was that all right, you're gonna get a new coach and it's gonna get better and the coach is gonna give you all the answers. When in reality, you needed that sense of accountability. You needed that, as Chris Peace coined, that 'New Standard.' And the players needed to set a certain standard for what was appropriate. What was acceptable every day coming in and how we were gonna work.

ERIC SMITH: All the seniors, all the older guys knew that we were the stepping stone. We accepted it.

MATT JOHNS: To instill a culture you have to do things that are going to instill a culture. So that first year — wins and losses always matter, so I don't want to sit here and say wins and losses didn't matter, because they did. But they were trying to instill the culture before we could win games. So that meant okay, we need to show these guys what this extra level of conditioning looks like. What that extra level of working hard within a practice looks like.

JACKSON MATTEO: You can't win before you set a culture. It would have been backwards. Wouldn't have been a strong foundation. You need that year where 20 guys quit or transfer. And you make everyone earn everything at every single turn. It was my senior year and I was doing an interview, it was right before senior day and someone asked me, 'What is there to play for?' I basically just said that is what you're playing for. The future of this program.

DONTE WILKINS: I think the younger guys were tired of losing as well, regardless of what year they were. We had first-years on that team like Joe Reed. We had first-years like Bryce Hall and Jordan Mack. You’ve got really good football players on that team who’ve seen how we were leading and knew that they could get things done. They were really good football players. So I think they were like, ‘Hey, coach said it’s when we want to,’ and they kind of just did what they had to do to just take things over.

CHRIS PEACE: I think guys saw how dedicated this coaching staff was. Even when things went sour they kept the same energy. I think that kind of inspired us. It was almost like you don’t want to disappoint somebody, and I feel like we probably felt like we disappointed that staff the way that season went. I know it’s a team effort, an organizational effort, but it made us more hungry because we worked our ass off and we still went 2-10. We knew the amount of work they were putting in for us. I think it inspired us so much more, and then that January 2017, I think that’s when the shift started happening. Guys came back with a level of energy I’d never seen before.

Sparked by a 5-1 start, the Cavaliers finished the 2017 regular season 6-6 and played in the program’s first bowl game in six seasons. In 2018, a 28-0 win over South Carolina in the Belk Bowl capped an eight-win season for the Wahoos. That run of ‘unbroken growth’ culminated in a nine-win 2019 campaign that saw the Hoos snap a 15-game losing streak against Virginia Tech, win the ACC’s Coastal Division for the first time and make the program’s first-ever Orange Bowl appearance. Mendenhall is 28-22 at Virginia since that two-win season in 2016.

ERIC SMITH: I jokingly say now that I wish I could be recruited to go back for a couple years, knowing that I was one of the guys who were a template for what’s coming,

MATT JOHNS: The conversations were always, 'It's not if; it's just when.' It's something that is cool to look back on and see that we were able to lay the foundation for that. A lot of times that gets forgotten because we didn't win, and people only remember the wins and losses. But I think that coaching staff remembers that first year as vividly as ever. Losing to Richmond and then doing things that season that were not ACC-like, and then coming back to go to an Orange Bowl three or four years later is pretty unbelievable.

QUIN BLANDING: We knew going through the pain and the suffering and all the losses, I look back on it honestly as a blessing, and I wouldn't change it for the world, because a lot of people couldn't do what we did. A lot of people couldn't go and set a foundation without quitting and trying to transfer out, like most people did. A lot of people quit out on us. But one thing about us, we didn't quit. We kept going. I'm happy I was a part of that. I'm happy I was allowed to lay the foundation because now I can hold onto that for the rest of my life.

JACKSON MATTEO: I took a lot of pride in being a part of that 2-10 team, because man, it was like we had to walk so they could run. And I was just over at Coach Tujague's house the other day, he had the freshman O-linemen over, and they were kind of asking me questions about what it used to be like and stuff. And it's good that they'll never know what it was like. It's good that they'll never know how bad it really was when the transition of power happened, and what Mendenhall had inherited.

CHRIS PEACE: Coming back here this spring and the past few months [Peace rejoined the program this offseason as a graduate assistant coach], just to see that grass field. This thing came light years. You go in the stadium locker room. You see that they’re trying to build things, like the new facility that’s on the way. It’s amazing to see, and it’s only gonna keep growing. I’m glad our efforts didn’t go to waste. Seeing stuff like that makes me proud. As I’m showing around recruits, I keep telling them, ‘Man, it didn’t look like this when I was here.’

DONTE WILKINS: Every day was a blessing to be able to play with Coach Mendenhall. For that spring and then that fall season, it was the best season of my life. I had fun. I pushed myself to limits I didn’t know I could be pushed to, thanks to Coach Mendenhall and then our whole defensive staff, the offensive staff. It showed us that guys could actually coach football together and actually like each other, and we can actually have fun with coaches who actually care for us as well.

NICHOLAS CONTE: Coach Mendenhall was big on, ’You’re a part of this family forever.’ And they’ve lived up to it. I’ll go back and I’ll visit and see them, and they welcome me with open arms. We sit there and talk about not just football but life in general. Even if they’re having a really busy day, they’ll take the time to talk to you and let you know that without you, there wouldn’t have been that success.

ERIC SMITH: I appreciate Coach Mendenhall and Coach Tujague and the whole staff. They’ve shown nothing but support and love since I left. I was one of the guys that they had for the least amount of time, so for them to show the amount of love and affection and support that they’ve shown, I really appreciate those guys more than they know. For them to reach out and say ‘I believe in you,’ things like that really mean the world to you.

MICAH KISER: Coach Mendenhall actually texted me last weekend and said, 'Thanks for laying the foundation,' which is really cool to see. It's just a sense of pride now. I think that was one thing that I used to always talk about with Quin, just leaving the place better than we found it. And I think when we started there, there were a lot of questions in the air and not a clear path moving forward, and I think we have laid a solid foundation. We had gotten better the years I was there, and after leaving they have a nine-win season and an Orange Bowl. Honestly I can say I'm proud of where the program is and where it's going.