DeShaun Foster reveals Corey Miller is back as UCLA strength coach

Corey Miller is the new UCLA strength and conditioning coach after spending a year away from the program, head coach DeShaun Foster revealed on Thursday.

Miller previously served as UCLA’s director of speed and movement from 2022-2023 before moving on to serve as the assistant director of strength and conditioning for the Carolina Panthers in the NFL.

“We had a transition in strength coaches,” Foster said after practice on Thursday. “I brought Corey Miller back. [Keith Belton] went to the Dallas Mavericks and I brought Corey from the Carolina Panthers. He said that (the players) had an awesome summer just transitioning into his style from KB’s.”

During his time with the Panthers, Miller was in charge of setting up workout plans for the offensive and defensive line units. He briefly worked with the Los Angeles Rams in 2022 through the league’s Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship.

Before that, he was the director of football sports performance at Ole Miss for the 2021 season. From 2017-19, Miller was an assistant on the South Carolina strength and conditioning staff and has worked under coaches like Lane Kiffin and Will Muschamp.

Given his wealth of experience, the Bruins headman pointed to another quality which drove him to seek out Miller for the open position.

“Familiarity,” Foster said was the driving force in bringing him back. “He’s from Spartanburg, South Carolina. So there’s a connection, that’s where we had training camp (with the Carolina Panthers) when we were there. So, me and him have always had a good relationship, basically. So that was one of the guys I really want to bring back. He wanted to come back, he’s at home.”

In the offical release announcing Miller’s hire, Foster noted that he was impressed by Miller’s ability to “get the most out of players during his previous time with our program,” and that he feels as though, “there is no one better to uphold our pillars while preparing the Bruins for Big Ten Conference play and beyond.”

The Bruins will begin the 2024 regular season on the road against Hawaii on Aug. 31 before turning around the next week for a Big Ten Conference opener against Indiana. With the LSU Tigers, Oregon Ducks and Penn State Nittany Lions all looming in consecutive weeks before the second week of October, the beginning of the DeShaun Foster era in LA has it’s work cut out for it.