You never forget how to ride a bike, and you apparently never forget how to play tight end either.
 
Senior Ray Hudson is one of five Golden Bears on the 2017 Cal football roster, along with Matt Laris, Jake Ashton, Justin Norbeck and Kyle Wells, who are now listed as tight ends. First-year head coach Justin Wilcox and offensive coordinator Beau Baldwin have reinstituted the position in the offense.
 
Hudson said not only was he excited to hear that the tight end would be back in the fold, but through five Cal spring football practices, he's found that it hasn't been too difficult to transition back to the position that he used to play regularly in high school.
 
"I was stoked," he said when he heard tight ends were back. "The first thing I wanted to hear was if I was switching inside because I just wanted to get my hand on the ground and hit some people. Two of the touchdowns I caught last year were from a tight end-like position, so I've made catches in that role, but it's different in some ways even though the familiarity is there."
 
One thing Hudson said has been a noticeable difference is his weight. He's put on about 20 pounds, which changes the way he runs routes as a tight end.
 
He also added that he's been focusing a lot more on reading the defense and blocking. With the help of tight ends coach Charlie Ragle, Hudson said he felt like a tight end after just the second practice of the spring.
 
Ragle said he was really impressed with how quickly the tight ends starting picking things up right from the start.
 
"The first thing you notice when you get here, and you start to work with them, is you see why they are students at Cal," he said. "They are smart, and it comes out right away in the meeting rooms and transfers right onto the field."
 
Having been in this position before at other schools of bringing the tight end back into an offense where it previously had not been utilized, Ragle has experience with working with players unfamiliar with the position.
 
He added that since experience will be an issue for the time being, he's taking it slow with the tight ends, going back to basic fundamentals with individual drills.
 
"With what we're going to do with the tight ends here, you have to drill and teach a lot of fundamental football," Ragle said. "From that perspective, it's really back to the very beginning, from footwork to hand placement and basic fundamentals."
 
Baldwin echoed Ragle's statements that the transition of the tight ends has been going well through the early practices of spring ball. Baldwin added, though, that things are likely to get more challenging when the Bears start working more true game-like situations.
 
"It's one of the more challenging positions on the field, depending on how you want to use them," Baldwin said. "They're involved in the run game, the pass game and in protection situations. But it's a hungry group that's excited about a slightly different role than they've had before, and they're just going to keep attacking it."
 
Baldwin added that it's been encouraging to see how excited the tight ends are about learning a new role in the offense. They're eager to learn and make an impact, but he said they still need to earn the right to be on the field on gamedays. They have to prove to Baldwin, Ragle and Wilcox that they deserve to be on the field when the coaches want to use a formation that includes a tight end.
 
Quick to accept the challenges of learning a new position, Hudson said he has spent a lot of time watching film once the coaches told him about his position change.
 
"I enjoy the position itself because there is a lot more craftsmanship," he said. "You can really change small things in your game to improve going one-on-one against a defensive end, when you're going up against a linebacker in the blocking schemes or you're running routes inside and reading everything. It fits me better, especially, as I was recruited to come in as a tight end, and it's fitting my body type better for me."
 
With Hudson's background of playing tight end in high school, Ragle said he'll use the 15 spring ball practices to "knock the dust off," and that by the end of spring ball, hopefully it's as if he never stopped playing tight end and the Bears should be able to take the "training wheels" off.