Bronco Mendenhall Talks About Leaving UVA and How His Faith Continues to Direct His Life

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By Sarah Jane Weaver, Church News

On a recent cool morning in northwest Montana, Bronco Mendenhall was up at dawn, working the ranch he is building with his wife, Holly.

Wearing blue jeans and work boots, the former University of Virginia football coach sported a belt won at a rodeo by his father.

He fed the cows and saddled the horses and welcomed visitors to his riding arena.

Then, still working while he talked, the Latter-day Saint coach shared one secret to his college football success.

Horses — which both he and his wife learned to love in their youth — are a powerful recruiting tool, he explained.

“In the world of college athletics, you’re looking to be distinct and different,” Mendenhall said. The horses “ended up being fantastic in helping us assess and select and determine” prospective athletes at UVA.

In Virginia, Mendenhall would invite recruits to spend some time with his horses and then to ride them. The process was revealing.

“I could see how they approach doing something new,” Mendenhall said. “I could get a real clear idea … how a young person would take on a new challenge — and then, if they would listen, if they would learn and if they would engage, if they would help their teammate or potential teammate who was riding.”

After 30 minutes in the arena and 30 minutes on the trails in and around the Mendenhalls’ property, he knew if this was “someone I wanted to be with every single day.”

Often, at the end of the riding lesson, Mendenhall would signal his assistant coaches, letting them know if the recruit would be a good fit for their football team.

It was the subtle things the recruits did or did not do that were the most important, he said. Would they get off the horse and lead it back to Mendenhall? Or did they just drop the reins. Would they ask: “What can I do?” or “Can I brush him down?” or “Does he like to be scratched?”

Some potential recruits didn’t want to learn to ride a horse, they didn’t listen or they wouldn’t try.

They had to be “willing to do hard things,” Mendenhall said. “College football is hard. Life is hard. New things are a challenge. And a lot of folks, especially starting in about junior high, like to watch from the sidelines because they are afraid of what other people will think. I’m not okay with that way to live. And so, if they weren’t willing to engage in a new thing, then that wasn’t okay, and they weren’t aligned with the direction” of the UVA football program.

So much of recruiting is “tailored toward first impressions and best impressions,” Mendenhall said, noting he wanted the experience with him to be different for the athletes. He tried to send the message: “This is who we are, this is how we live, this is really everything that this program is going to be about. See it and then self-select.”

And for Mendenhall — a cowboy at heart — it was a winning formula.

In his six years at UVA, his team was bowl-eligible five times — the first time that happened at the university in 22 years.

‘Change Was Needed’

Mendenhall accepted the head football coaching job at UVA after 11 years in the same position at Brigham Young University. Many of the assistant coaches he worked with at BYU followed him to the Atlantic Coast Conference.

There they had immediate success. Still, at the end of the 2021 football season, on December 2, 2021, Mendenhall announced his plans to step down as head coach after that year’s bowl game.

The decision, he said, was so personal that it was hard to articulate. “It was clear to me,” he said, “change was needed.”

Speaking to the media after the announcement, he simply explained, “I remember saying along the way that I would like the end of my life to add so much value that people forgot I was a football coach, and they’d have to go back and look it up [and say], ‘Oh, wait, that guy, he coached football at some point.’

“I’ve tried to add that value at the same time through football. But I would love for the next part to be helpful to others, impactful to others, inspiring to others, to do things of real value and substance. And maybe someone will remember, if I’m wearing an old ball cap or something: ‘Oh, wait, you used to be in football, right?’ ”

Mendenhall and his family relocated to Montana — where Holly Mendenhall grew up and where he promised her they could spend “chapter 2” of their lives together.

Clarity came with time and distance.

The landscape of college football is changing, he explained. “If you’re going to do this job, you’d better be really clear, ‘Is it what you want to do?’ and ‘How come?’”

Two years later, Mendenhall has not closed the door on college coaching. After taking two seasons off, he said he is open to talking to universities and determining if a potential job could be a good fit.

Former BYU and Virginia football coach Bronco Mendenhall accepts job at New Mexico

‘Who Are You Without Your Job?’

As Bronco and Holly Mendenhall show visitors around their Montana property, it is obvious both are deliberate and intentional builders — of football teams and homes and people.

Mendenhall’s visitors are not comfortable on horses, yet he patiently coached them up. Once in the saddle, he talked about posture and confidence and control. Just like with his college football recruits, they spend some time in the riding arena and then hit the trails.

Holly Mendenhall said her husband has a desire to help people become better human beings. In Virginia, she said, Mendenhall had a bookshelf filled with a variety of books. When players asked for advice, he gave them a reading assignment. “The players would come to him and say, ‘Coach, what about this?’ And he would say, ‘Well, I’ve got a book for you,’” said Holly Mendenhall. “So they would take that book, go read it and come back. And then he would teach them. … It didn’t just end on the field.”

No one “likes to win more than I do, or as much,” Bronco Mendenhall explained, still talking about football. “However, that and that alone isn’t enough.”

Mendenhall said he was asked one time, “Who are you without your job, without your title, without your money?”

He wants the athletes he works with to understand they are both a football player and something else.

Mendenhall said a wise mentor puts in the effort to receive discernment. Helping to strengthen individuals will not only strengthen teams, but also families, communities, companies, charities or other organizations. “Then football starts to be lasting, impactful, meaningful, in addition to the championships and the confetti.”

Rooted in Beliefs

The Mendenhalls’ love of the outdoors and this area is embedded in their history. Years ago, weeks after losing a job at Oregon State University, Bronco proposed to Holly at Glacier National Park. She said “yes to an unemployed football coach,” he said. And when he accepted a new job offer at Louisiana Tech, their honeymoon was driving a Ryder truck from Missoula, Montana, to Ruston, Louisiana.

Back then, Mendenhall promised his young wife that one day they would return to Montana. “And so now, after 32 years of coaching, 26 years of marriage, we have a permanent place in Montana,” he said.

In addition to the ranch, they are also finishing a home located nearby. Both the ranch and the home, they hope, will be a gathering place for their three sons and future grandchildren.

The building projects, they anticipate, will be completed in the next few weeks, Mendenhall said. Leaving the door to a future coaching opportunity open, he explained: “We love the impact. We love the development. We love helping kids through the game of football.”

Every decision, from building a home or building a winning football team — to walking away from coaching altogether — he said, is rooted in beliefs.

“There’s not a decision that I make or that we make that doesn’t start with our beliefs. And our beliefs then guide the principles, and our principles guide our choices. Our choices guide our actions, and you pull that thread, it’s back to our beliefs.”

As a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he continued, “I work as hard as I can to be a disciple of Christ. I do all I can — imperfectly — to follow our Savior’s teachings.”

And the decision to pause his career while at UVA was no different. “I was feeling a little too tilted toward ‘football is everything.’ And it’s not. Is it important? Yes. Are outcomes important? Yes.”

But he wanted more balance.

While coaching at Virginia, a guiding principle of the coaching staff was “family first, last and always.” They didn’t work on Sundays. Coaches had a late start Friday mornings to walk their kids to school. And Thursday nights were dedicated to family time at the Mendenhall property — where the coaches and their families could spend time together, swimming or riding horses.

As a result, Mendenhall’s UVA coaching staff worked on average 17 to 24 hours less than the staffs in comparable programs. “Some would say, ‘Well, you would have won more if you worked more,’” Mendenhall said. “I think we won as much as we did because of how fresh, vibrant and renewed we were while living our values.”

Those family values flowed to the athletes on Mendenhall’s team, Holly Mendenhall said. Many “experienced a lot of things with the coaches’ families that they had never really experienced before” — such as attending extended family gatherings and participating in children’s birthday parties.

President Russell M. Nelson, Mendenhall said, has taught him there are more important titles than football coach.

“We know we’re children of God. We know we’re disciples of Christ. We know we’re children of the covenant. That is our identity. And I would hope we would live in a way that others know that’s who we are.”

• Episode 151: Coach Bronco Mendenhall and his wife, Holly Mendenhall, talk about family, faith and football with guest host Sheri Dew
• Video: How Bronco and Holly Mendenhall’s testimony and beliefs define their decisions
• From the archives: For Bronco Mendenhall, the impact of leaving BYU for Virginia transcends football
• BYU Education Week: BYU AD Tom Holmoe and the Big 12 era