A familiar face will be back on the UCLA sideline at the Rose Bowl this fall.
Following a multi-year coaching stint with the Green Bay Packers, Ramsen Golpashin has returned to Westwood, joining first-year head coach Deshaun Foster’s Bruin football staff as a defensive analyst.
A member of the School of Education and Information Studies’ first Transformative Coaching and Leadership (TCL) program cohort, Golpashin spent several years at UCLA, working under former head coach Chip Kelly before taking his talents to the NFL ranks.
In Green Bay, he worked alongside Pro Bowlers and future Hall of Famers, including Aaron Rodgers and former UCLA stars, Kenny Clark and Marcedes Lewis.
Preparing some of the best players in the game, Golpashin says he was initially surprised by the yearn for coaching he discovered from the league’s best.
“The job was not for the faint of heart,” he explains. “There were days when you didn’t go to sleep. Days where you went home for 40 minutes and went right back to the office.
“But on days when it was 2:00 a.m. and you’re drawing pictures and you hate it, you’re thinking about how Aaron Rodgers is going to be looking at this in the morning and how it has to be right.”
Born just north of the Los Angeles area in Santa Clarita, Golpashin made a name for himself on the gridiron at Saugus High School. A no-corners-cut type of guy, he matriculated to the University of Oregon, where members of the Ducks’ coaching staff took note of his talents at a team tryout his freshman year.
He would go on to earn a walk-on spot on Oregon’s star-studded roster. And, just over a year later, he was awarded an athletic scholarship.
But his passion for football soured shortly thereafter.
Suffering a torn ACL his senior season, he felt burnt out.
“I honestly didn’t want anything to do with football at that point,” he admits. “Especially coaching.”
Funny how things turned out.
His first fall after graduation, Golpashin was back in his hometown of Santa Clarita, working for his father’s contracting business.
Needless to say, it was only a matter of months before he began to feel the football “itch.”
Encouraged by his former high school mentor to help the team out, Golpashin hit his stride working with the Centurions. And after two seasons of coaching high school ball, he jumped at an opportunity to join the University of Hawaii football staff as a graduate assistant.
With the Rainbow Warriors, a midseason coaching staff shakeup saw him elevated to Offensive Line Coach, a role he would leverage in the years to come, which featured coaching stops at his alma mater, Oregon, Cal and eventually UCLA.
It was during that time, while he was working with the Bruins as an assistant, that he began pursuing a Master of Education degree in Transformative Coaching and Leadership.
“Ramsen was actually involved in a focus group we held when we were beginning to create the TCL program,” Dr. Arif Amlani recalls.
With Golpashin emphasizing ties between teaching and coaching, his input helped shape coursework that was later developed.
“I didn’t have much expectation,” he says. “You’re thinking, ‘It’s the first year of this, what am I going to learn from the gymnastics coach or the softball coach that I wouldn’t already learn from being around football coaches all day?’
“And I couldn’t have been more wrong.”
“Sue Enquist, Miss Val and all our instructors taught me so much.”
“You’re learning from people who have won multiple national championships and are the best at what they do. I remember Sue brought in Dawn Staley – one of the best coaches in the country. In your head, you’re like ‘These are the experiences and connections you can only get at a place like UCLA.”
“And I realized I’d been so enthralled in the coaching world and the football world, that I’d become underdeveloped in other areas.”
One of the spaces he found lacking was his interpersonal communications skills — a part of his coaching toolkit he says was essential when he worked in the NFL.
“How to interact with people and not be such a hermit X’s and O’s guy,” he jokes. “It really helped me in that regard.”
Reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic, Golpashin says the time he spent away from players served as an opportunity to better develop his coaching philosophy.
“I was able to revisit my whole career and ask myself ‘What am I trying to help players get out of me coaching?’
“The TCL program emphasizes just that–asking yourself the ‘why’ of your coaching and then developing a philosophy that is authentic and true to your own values” Amlani adds.
“If you take time and invest time into developing that philosophy and articulate what you want to be about as a person – that’s really important.”
Being able to develop that outlook early in your career is huge,” he says. “And living up to that philosophy is key — not switching up depending how the wind blows and being somebody different.”
“The program helped me organize my thoughts. As a coach you have a lot of thoughts in your head; a lot of X’s and O’s. And having the time to put those down for a second and think about your career – that was huge for me.”
Now tasked with engineering the Bruins game day management, Golpashin says he’s reveling the opportunity to work with Foster during his inaugural year as head coach.
“In college, you still have an opportunity to affect lives on a personal level and help develop guys,” he explains. “You can still mold them and shape them and help them.
“We’ve built a staff of guys who want to help guys earn that degree, first and foremost, but also put them on track to continued success, whether that’s playing ball at the next level or not.”
Getting to do so in Westwood is just icing on the cake, he says.
“A place like this attracts people who have been able to do great things. In your head, you’re like ‘These are the experiences and connections you can only get at a place like UCLA.’”
In addition to his Master of Education from UCLA in TCL, Golpashin earned his undergraduate degree in General Business at Oregon, later adding a Master of Business Administration with an emphasis in Sports Marketing.
Learn more about UCLA’s Transformative Coaching and Leadership Master of Education program.