In the bowels of Pauley Pavilion, under a court named for UCLA’s most iconic coach, the next chapter of UCLA athletics unfolded. Over lunch on May 24, 2016, every UCLA head coach and a handful of senior athletic department staffers met with executives from a Baltimore-based apparel company.

Only hours before, the news had become official: UCLA inked a record-breaking $280 million shoe and apparel deal with Under Armour.

Scattered among five round tables, eight to a table, coaches and administrators offered their suggestions for the future of the UCLA brand. How might an East Coast company come to Westwood and elevate the image of UCLA above its current standing?

The answer evolved over the next 13 months between UCLA’s announcement of the richest apparel deal in college sports and the beginning of the 15-year partnership on July 1.

Finding the story

Upon entering UCLA’s Hall of Fame, Adam Clement was awestruck by the sight of 113 national championship trophies. In that moment, he truly understood UCLA’s motto “Champions made here.”

“Every school brings us something different, gives us something different to tell, but at UCLA, it’s championships,” said Clement, the senior creative director of team sports at Under Armour.

Clement and a team of seven Under Armour designers toured the UCLA campus well before pitching their story to UCLA. They saw the buildings, studied the history and analyzed the school’s most iconic figures from John Wooden to Jackie Robinson to Arthur Ashe.

What they saw was a beautiful campus — one of the most beautiful they have ever toured — and a brilliant athletic legacy mired in inconsistent branding.

Navy blue, light blue, powder blue, shimmery gold and bright yellow. Script logos with no tail, with a skinny tail, with a larger tail filled with text. UCLA had nearly as many representations as it did national championships.

“It was worse than we even imagined as far as how different we looked across all the different sports,” said Josh Rebholz, UCLA’s senior associate athletic director for external relations.

In its vision for a new UCLA, Under Armour sought to unify the athletic department behind a central story.

Clement’s storytelling tool is the UCLA stripe, which will be on uniforms across all UCLA sports. Red Sanders introduced the famous stripe to the football uniforms in 1949. When Clement sees the mark, he’s inspired by a quote he found on the school’s website: “As UCLA moves onward, we leverage our history to define our future.”

He deconstructs the UCLA stripe as three parallel stripes, all touching. The outside two, which are the same color, represent the past and present. The middle stripe is of another color. It represents the future, guided by the other two.

“It’s understanding that lots of great things have happened before Under Armour at UCLA and we’re just a chapter,” Clement said. “We’re just happy to be part of the next phase of this story.”

Meeting in the middle

Valorie Kondos Field has been part of UCLA’s story for 34 years. The gymnastics coach believes fiercely in the school’s reputation for innovation and illustrates that value with her team through unique floor choreography and daring leotard designs.

UCLA’s leotards, which Kondos Field designs with independent contractor Candy Dengrove, have been backless. They’ve had lace. They’ve even had fishnet. But they have not had a stripe.

The UCLA gymnastics look is provocative elegance. It is not collegiate with the straightforward Powderkeg Blue, Westwood Gold and UCLA stripe. That’s for the other sports.

“If you put all the uniforms together, including a leotard, you can tell they’re all from the same family. That’s going to be hard with a leotard,” Kondos Field said last week while waiting to see new samples. “There are no sparkles on any other team.”

When she heard of Clement’s interpretation of the UCLA stripe and Under Armour’s vision for the athletic department, Kondos Field was utterly inspired. It was the best presentation she’d ever seen. She proclaimed mid-presentation that she wanted to go home immediately, pull all of her blue and gold gear out of her closet and flaunt it proudly.

She believes in this next chapter of UCLA. She just doesn’t want to turn the page completely.

“This is going to be a hard vision to marry this first year,” Kondos Field said. “I think the biggest challenge will be maintaining that elegant, artistic look with an athletic company.”

Passing the test

For Jorge Salcedo, it wasn’t as much about look as it was about feel. It’s the feeling of soccer cleats on his players’ feet, of the ball as it’s being kicked through the air, of a jersey on a hot day.

Under Armour has met each challenge so far.

Since May, the UCLA men’s soccer head coach and his team have come to grips with replacing Adidas, the premier soccer retailer in the world, with Under Armour, a relatively new company in the sport.

Salcedo, who wore Adidas for the Bruins when he kicked the winning penalty kick after four overtimes against Rutgers in 1990 NCAA championship game, said he was won over by CEO Kevin Plank’s enthusiasm and commitment to UCLA. His players were won over by the recent shipment of gear that passed their stringent quality tests.

“The guys are very pleasantly surprised and happy with what they’ve seen, all the way from the shoes to the uniforms to the training gear,” Salcedo said.

When evaluating the new equipment, Salcedo was impressed by the company’s soccer ball. It felt high-end with the correct weight that allowed consistent flight and bounce. The jerseys are constructed for optimal performance, absorbing sweat without getting heavy.

The process, much like the rest of the athletic department’s transition, took months and finished in the nick of time. Salcedo was still picking out embroidery for the new jerseys last Wednesday, three days before the apparel deal’s official start.

Unloading the gear

A box-lined tunnel carves out the path from the back door of the football equipment room to the main space. Stacked nine or 10 boxes high, those that create the walkway are only the beginning of Darwin Beacham’s worries.

As director of football equipment operations, Beacham leads a team of equipment managers responsible for checking in the new Under Armour gear, incorporating it into the equipment room’s system of organized chaos and issuing it to players.

About 1,200 boxes were dropped off in June, and about 1,000 more came last Friday. Not all of them are for football, but most are.

He’s cleared most of them by distributing gear to the football team during its summer workouts. He and his team stuff each player’s laundry cubby with all the essentials: shoes, socks, T-shirts, shorts, sweatpants. The cubbies are lined up against the wall, 120 in total, with a curiously displayed USC football helmet on top.

At this time last year, when the equipment team could still use its backlog of Adidas gear, it just needed to outfit the incoming freshmen. With the switch, every football player is due for a time-consuming makeover.

Inside the thousands of boxes, Under Armour sent everything from jerseys and pants to undershirts and compression shorts to even belts and sunglasses. Some are still unopened, labeled with thick black permanent marker and kept out of the way on top of tall metal shelves. Space is limited and those items can wait.

To rid itself of the outdated Adidas gear, UCLA held a surplus sale in April, and donated the rest, roughly $12,000 worth, to the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare Center.

That chapter of UCLA is done.

Unveiling the next chapter

July 1 was “a monumental day” for Under Armour and UCLA, Clement said. At the stroke of midnight, the online UCLA Store and Bruin Team Shop flipped. Out with Adidas, in with Under Armour.

Twelve hours later, a blue construction curtain was lifted to reveal a new Under Armour store front on a custom-made polished concrete floor at the UCLA Store in Ackerman Union. It’s the only place in the store that doesn’t have tile or carpet flooring. The UCLA stripe is displayed prominently, running from the ceiling to the floor on support columns.

UCLA didn’t pick Under Armour for the money, Rebholz insists. Yes, the $280 million was a headline-grabbing perk, but the deal extends further than a big payday.

The 37-page contract details Under Armour’s plans to open two Los Angeles-area flagship stores by 2019 and feature UCLA gear to boost the school’s apparel sales. The company pledged $1 million annually to UCLA’s marketing budget for the next 15 years. Streamlining the athletic department’s branding will make the school’s logo even more recognizable between Under Armour’s Baltimore offices, UCLA’s Westwood campus and beyond.

This chapter of UCLA athletics is just beginning.