Aday Mara had completed a series of pull-ups and curls, not to mention a few delicate minutes walking backward on a high-performance treadmill, when the strain of his post-practice training started to show.
Laboring to finish a set of shoulder pull-downs, he succeeded only after his workout whisperer weighed in.
“Rip it and squeeze!” demanded Dave Andrews, UCLA’s director of basketball athletic performance. “Come on, go!”
As the weights dropped with a satisfying thud, Andrews delivered his verdict amid the Spanish reggaeton blasting from Mara’s playlist inside the Bruins’ practice facility.
“Good!” Andrews said, assessing the sophomore center who was completing his preseason rehabilitation from a foot injury on this late October afternoon.
Moments later, Mara placed his left knee on a foam pad, commencing a series of alternating arm stretches. Andrews constantly checked his form, every movement accompanied by a directive.
“Drive! Drive! Drive!” Andrews barked.
Each drop of sweat came with a purpose. Maybe, after a freshman season filled with losses and frustration, all this toil finally would pay off.
He never thought it would be this hard.
Mara arrived at UCLA widely considered a ready-made star. He was 7 feet 3, the rarest of commodities. He had played on the Spanish national team at age 18. He could shoot with both hands, touch the ground flatfooted while hanging on the rim.
During his first practice with the Bruins, Mara wowed with his playmaking. Catching a pass in the high post, he zipped the ball through a defender’s legs to a teammate for a backdoor layup.
“Right then and there,” point guard Dylan Andrews said, “I knew what type of passer Aday was, having the IQ to be like, ‘OK, I can’t make the pass but there’s an open path, I’m going to find a way to get it there.’”
Any thoughts that the baby-faced freshman was ready to dominate ended quickly. After he barely played early in the season against nationally ranked Marquette and Gonzaga in the Maui Invitational, Mara realized that the college game was far more physical than he expected.
During his handful of minutes on the court, Mara got pushed around in the post.
“It doesn’t matter how tall you are if you can’t hold your ground and make your size a factor,” UCLA coach Mick Cronin said, “and he found that out.”
Maybe Mara wasn’t as ready as everybody — himself included — thought.
“I wasn’t thinking about the NBA or one and done,” Mara said, alluding to playing professionally after a single season. “I was with the mindset of, it would be not a bad year. But when I started playing and after the tournament in Hawaii, I just said, like, OK, this is totally different than what I was thinking, so I have to change, I have to work.”
Try as he might, there was never a sustained breakthrough. Mara reached double figures in scoring only once the rest of the season. He finished with modest averages of 3.5 points and 1.9 rebounds in 9.6 minutes per game, hardly the stuff of high NBA draft picks.
He returned home last summer to play in the FIBA Under-20 Eurobasket tournament, more disappointment awaiting. Spain lost to France in the final seconds of a quarterfinal. In July, there was another blow as Mara sustained a foot injury during a workout on campus.
Funny where setbacks can take someone.
The first thing Mara heard after the injury was his coach inquiring about a timetable for his return.
The second was Dave Andrews providing an edict.
“You and me,” the strength coach told him, “every day, weight room.”
Andrews had just reunited with Cronin after more than a decade apart. Having been the strength and conditioning coach during Cronin’s first six seasons at Cincinnati, Andrews went on to serve in a similar capacity for four college football teams before finding himself in need of a job after Iowa State’s staff was dismissed following the 2022 season.
Long a fan of Andrews’ tireless work ethic, Cronin hired his old colleague once an opening arose after last season. The coach told Mara, with barely a hint of humor, that Andrews — and not Mara’s mom or dad — was now the most important person in his life.
They spent hours together every weekday as part of Mara’s rehabilitation program, Andrews pushing his new protege to unlock potential as vast as Mara’s 7½-foot wingspan.
“He’s always like, ‘Oh, give me one more,’” Mara said. “Working with him, he just changed my mind to be more aggressive, more tough because when you go to the weight room and he told you to put more weight [on the machine] or do one more [rep], for your mind, you have to think that you’ve got to be tough to do that.”
Every time they worked out together, Mara set personal records. Quickly understanding where this endeavor might take him, he offered to increase his workload, saying he would come in for additional sessions on weekends. Andrews told him that would be counterproductive, that adequate recovery was essential to his progress.
Besides, the payoff already was evident. After weeks of workouts, Andrews told Mara to show anyone entering the weight room his biceps, prompting an obligatory flex. Assistant coach Rod Palmer said he could tell a difference based on Mara’s thickened neck.
Cronin said Mara told him his girlfriend traffic was picking up, though the message may have been lost in translation given what happened next.
Awakening to a text message from his mother, who had read about his love life in the Spanish media after they reported the exchange, Mara responded that he didn’t know anything about a new relationship.
“I’ll have to ask coach who is my girlfriend,” Mara said, recalling the story with a laugh, “because I think he knows better than me.”
Those long limbs have an athletic lineage.
Aday’s father, Javier, who’s 6-5, played professionally in Spain, spending two seasons with Basket Zaragoza, the same team his son joined. His mother, Gely Gomez, who’s 6-2, played and now coaches beach volleyball.
Blessed with size, Mara faced one significant disadvantage in his quest to become an instant college star. Unlike Americans who dominate at the high school level, Mara played sparingly for Basket Zaragoza. The team’s schedule was heavy on games and light on practices, stunting the development of a teenager who needed as much work on his technique as he could get.
“You know,” Cronin said of Mara’s path, “he’s a young kid growing up, learning to fight through things that are hard.”
A messy separation ensued when Zaragoza sued Mara, alleging breach of contract, when he left to go to UCLA (and the case is ongoing). Once on campus, Mara found himself on the receiving end of endless stares, particularly when he zipped around on a scooter that required him to slump over to reach the handlebars.
Roommate Lazar Stefanovic enjoyed strolling around Westwood with Mara because he felt practically invisible, even at a towering 6-7.
“Whenever you walk with him,” Stefanovic said, “you get treated like a normal person, like you’re not tall at all, because everybody just looks at him.”
Mara initially lived with Stefanovic, a native of Serbia, and freshmen Berke Buyuktuncel (Turkey) and Jan Vide (Slovenia), their four-bedroom suite serving as a sort of basketball United Nations. A bit of a neat freak, Stefanovic made sure everyone kept the common areas clean and inspired Mara with a consistent schedule prioritizing workouts and studying.
“That routine, if I see that every day, it’s going to help me to copy that routine,” said Mara, who lives with Stefanovic again after Buyuktuncel and Vide transferred amid massive roster turnover. “If I’m with a teammate who is late or he’s not working or he’s watching TV or he’s not clean, I would be doing the same without knowing, you know?”
Even before Mara reached his current height at 16, his life had been a series of accommodations. He needed bed extensions so that his size-18 feet didn’t dangle off the end. Walking through doorways sometimes required him to duck.
Planes always have been a pain, Mara often paying for an upgrade to a better class or for extra room in the emergency exit row. Otherwise he’ll select an aisle seat so he can stretch his feet into the middle of the plane, retracting them whenever the service cart rolls past.
No matter the situation, Mara greets most everyone and everything with a smile.
He smiles in warmups. While on the bench. While in games. While walking to the locker room.
After the Bruins beat Arizona State on the road last season, Mara pretended to kick a video tripod in a hallway as he walked past reporters, the playful gesture reflected in the smile of someone who was having a good time even though he didn’t play.
“I always try to be happy,” Mara said, “try to make some jokes.”
One place where his demeanor takes a serious turn is the weight room, cold steel never smiling back.
Untold hours of work have left Mara feeling lighter and faster even though he’s maintained the same weight. The upside of remaining at 250 pounds is that his body composition features more muscle and less fat. The goal has been to help Mara hold his own in the post, more easily switch onto smaller players while defending ball screens and accelerate toward the rim on pick and rolls.
“He’s got more strength, he’s got more power, he’s got more stamina than he had,” Andrews said before the season, “and you couple that with his attitude, with his pride? I feel like he’s going to go in a positive, positive direction.”
Even though Mara’s playing time — 9.2 minutes per game — hasn’t enjoyed an uptick, his production is on the climb. He’s averaging 4.4 points and nearly has doubled his rebounding to 3.3 per game while shooting 60.9%, a dramatic improvement from 44.2% last season.
Cronin repeatedly has said he wants Mara to play more because his off-the-charts efficiency can help the Bruins be the best version of themselves. But the coach’s words have not aligned with his lineups.
After he played 11 productive minutes against Nebraska last week, Mara appeared for only eight minutes against Michigan, getting yanked after being beaten by the Wolverines’ Vladislav Goldin for one of his many dunks. Mara barely played during the Bruins’ 79-61 loss to Maryland on Friday, Cronin labeling a game beset by grabbing and holding “too physical” for the biggest man on his roster.
Unwilling to merely wait for a larger role, Mara often goes back to the weight room with Andrews for workouts after home games, unflinching in his belief that all this effort eventually is going to be worth it.
“I’m not going to say that my injury was the best thing that could happen,” Mara said, “but I can say being with Dave all these months was probably the best thing that happened to me.”
