LOS ANGELES — It has already been a memorable, magical season for UCLA women’s basketball. The Bruins are No. 2 in the country, Big Ten regular-season champions, riding a 21-game winning streak and being talked about in the same vein as women’s hoops royalty Connecticut and South Carolina.
But the hard part starts now, with the regular-season finale against USC on Sunday afternoon at Galen Center, followed by the Big Ten Conference Tournament this coming week and beyond that another shot at the NCAA Tournament.
Coach Cori Close reminds her players, presumably often, that the job isn’t complete. But I asked her earlier this week, during an interview session in her on-campus office, if she occasionally had to remind herself of that fact as well?
“We are so focused on what championship habits look like, and (what the) processes look like, that there’s this unrelenting commitment to getting better every day, finding that edge every day, pushing ourselves out of that comfort zone,” she said. “And that includes me.
“I do want to balance it with joy and celebration as these young women accomplish things that have never been done before, but it never diminishes our drive for where we’re going.”
There were lessons to remember from a year ago, when the Bruins were No. 1 for much of the regular season, reached the Final Four in Tampa and were drilled by eventual champ UConn, 85-51, in a national semifinal.
Given that the Huskies are again ranked No. 1, undefeated and seemingly the biggest obstacle to where the Bruins want to go, those lessons loom larger than ever. The first one: Last year, in their first Final Four under Close, the atmosphere caught up with them.
“It was just so much heaviness,” she said. “I’d never been No. 1 in the country for 14 straight weeks. We’d never been to the Final Four. … I think that all of us, from our players to me as the head coach, are better equipped and have a little more of a proactive strategic mindset this year.”
Those events are part of a documentary, “You See L.A.,” from some of the same people responsible for the “Welcome To Wrexham” series. It will be shown on Fox Sports 1 at 5 p.m. Sunday, following the telecast of the UCLA-USC game. Executive producer Jeff Luini and Kelsey Trainor guided the production, which followed UCLA’s team throughout last season.
“I signed with Kelsey and Jeff because I trusted them that they would tell the story the way it needed to be told,” Close said. “But that didn’t mean I was always gonna be comfortable with it. And so there are some uncomfortable moments. … This is not a fluff piece.”
It goes without saying that she’s working toward a sequel with a happier ending this spring.
Beyond the unfamiliar expectations and obligations involved with last year’s Final Four were one factor peculiar to UCLA and one peculiar to the current landscape of college basketball.
It is a quirk of the quarter system that UCLA’s final exams tend to fall right in the middle of the NCAA Tournament – but, then, Bruins teams have dealt with that for years. It gives those banners in the rafters of Pauley Pavilion extra meaning.
Close’s attention was divided last spring because of an urgency to sign revenue sharing contracts with players in advance of the settlement of the House v. NCAA lawsuit last April. As it turned out, objections by some athletes led Judge Claudia Wilken to hold off on final approval until June, but at the time the deadline was believed to be the day after the national championship game.
Then again, in the new, unsettled world of college athletics where every player is a free agent, roster management is a full-time concern for all coaches – dividing their time between coaching the current team and worrying about next year’s. Before our conversation this past week, Close said she was on a Zoom teleconference discussing “roster construction, what we can pay for certain positions. I was meeting with my GM and my sort of advisory team and planning for exactly that.”
But maybe joy is the secret weapon for these Bruins. Their roster is not only talented – Close suggested it will produce six WNBA first-round picks, assuming that league reaches a collective bargaining agreement with its players soon – but is close-knit.
An example:
“Lauren (Betts) and Charlisse (Leger-Walker) and Gabriela (Jaquez) are all doing a routine at the men’s game with the dance team at halftime” of the Tuesday game against Nebraska, Close said. “It’s hilarious. And they’ve been doing all these rehearsals. They’ve been loving it. But they said it’s been really fun because they’ve gotten to know other people, but the entire team is like, ‘OK, we have to be sitting right there on the floor, can’t wait to cheer them on.’”
“Work hard” seems to be the mantra, but also take time to enjoy the process and the people alongside you.
“If I had a regret of last year it was … we didn’t celebrate enough,” Close said. “We didn’t have enough joy. I think it got heavier and the pressure (increased) and we didn’t play our best basketball in the Final Four.
“I think that’s my only focus, having the right emotional mindset, the right mental mindset, having the … freshness so that we’re playing our best basketball when we need to.”
AN UNEXPECTED VOCATION
Time does sneak up on you. Close is now in her 15th season at UCLA, and she’s the winningest women’s basketball coach in school history at 348-149 entering Sunday’s game (she passed the late Billie Moore’s 296 victories as Bruins coach early last season). But this wasn’t something she had envisioned more than three decades ago, when she was playing point guard at UC Santa Barbara. She thought she might become a high school coach, or teaching or maybe working with a youth organization.
“I really had no idea this would be all I’d ever do,” she said. “I mean, 1993, fresh out of college, I got a chance to be a restricted earnings coach (at UCLA) and that is literally all I’ve done for 33 years. It’s mind-blowing to me because I really didn’t set out to do this.”
Mark French, who was her college coach at UCSB and is a legendary figure on that campus in retirement, deserves credit for helping guiding Close toward this path. It was a simple act few might have noticed that suggested his view of her capabilities.
“I ruptured my Achilles my freshman year, and I was just devastated,” Close recalled. “I’d played in one too many games to redshirt, so I’d played a little over 30 percent of the season. And I was just – I was brokenhearted.”
The Gauchos’ first game after she got out of surgery was against Long Beach State. She’d expected to sit at the end of the bench, or maybe up in the stands with her mother, but French had a surprise for her.
“He had pulled the bench chairs apart to be ready for my wheelchair,” she said. “And he had me wheel right next to him on the bench. And I didn’t think of it at the time, but he just was including me and it made all the difference for me. I felt a sense of ownership. I was learning. I felt I was growing.
“Maybe he did see something in me before I even saw it in myself.”
During Close’s two seasons as a graduate assistant at UCLA, she developed a bond with the late John Wooden through weekly visits. After she received her Master’s degree in 1995, French hired her as his lead assistant, and she was on the UCSB bench for nine seasons, with teams that were 233-54 and went to the NCAA Tournament all but one of those years.
““She wasn’t a fabulous athlete, but she proved to be a very smart and controlled player, a true coach on the floor,” French, who compiled a 438-200 coaching record in 12 seasons at Santa Barbara with 12 NCAA appearances before retiring, told the UCSB alumni magazine in 2018.
“She was unrelenting in her quest for excellence,” he added. “With the team, the staff, the school, the booster club, she could drive you to exhaustion.”
It’s part of pouring all of yourself into the job. That experience, and seven seasons as Florida State’s associate head coach – the Seminoles reached the NCAA Tournament all seven years – prepared her for a team of her own.
In her last 28 seasons of coaching between UCSB, Florida State and UCLA, she has reached the postseason in 25 of them (one being 2020 when the tournament wasn’t played because of COVID-19), and only two of those were the WNIT. At UCLA, her teams have reached five Sweet 16s, one Elite Eight and one Final Four, and also won the WNIT in 2015.
PAYING IT FORWARD
Close now has the opportunity to help a player who seems to have similar interest in coaching.
“Timea Gardner on our team right now, I think she’s destined to be a coach,” Close said. “She’s been thinking about it. She’s like, ‘OK, why did you pick that? Why did you think that way?’ And it’s so fun to talk with her about it.
“But it’s interesting. I was thinking about my own journey. I was like, ‘Man, I never thought that.’ You know, she’s gonna be so far ahead because she’s already really processing (it). I’m recruiting a young woman right now that is dead set (on being) a college coach. And so she’s really factoring that into her recruitment process, because she not only wants to be a great player and to be a professional, but she wants to be in an environment that’s gonna teach her how to be good coach, too.
“But that was never in my line of thinking. I think part of it, too, is I barely figured out how to be a female that got a college scholarship. I was the first woman out of my high school (Milpitas, near San José) to get a Division I full athletic ride. And I thought I was everything. I couldn’t even imagine (coaching). But I think it’s part of it is you have to see it to be able to achieve it and believe you could do it too.”
In that era, when the majority of women’s basketball coaches were men, it was much harder to imagine than it is now.
There’s this, too: When you have players who get it, who understand why the coach does what she does, it’s easier on everybody.
‘What I’ve really enjoyed about this group is that I would want them to know how incredibly selfless they’ve really been,” Close said. “Angela Dugalić is projected to be a first-round draft pick and she walked into this office earlier this year and says, ‘I understand we have six starters. I understand that you have an impossible job. I don’t care if I come off the bench all year long. I want to be trusted by you for big moments and at the end of the game.’ And what has she done? Exactly that.
“… They enjoy each other’s company. They’re really committed. On the hard days, they want to be held accountable, they want to be coached hard. It’s just pretty much been one of the most joyful, fun years of coaching I’ve ever had.”
You can imagine what would make it even more joyful.
jalexander@scng.com
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