SPOKANE — Cori Close cut down the net but kept the scissors. She had one more tiny snip to make. The UCLA Bruins coach had a regional championship net to wear in celebration after leading the program to its first women’s NCAA Final Four. She also had one little scrap of nylon that she had cut out separately, a piece that she wanted to share with her mother, Patti.
Patti has watched her daughter build this UCLA program into a contender over the last decade and a half. She has also watched her build a village.
“It’s a wonderful community now,” Patti Close says. “And it wasn’t that way when she came, but she’s drawn all these people in with her.”
There are coaches who remind people that their program should feel like a family. Close makes it all but impossible to forget. She never misses an opportunity to credit the assistant coach handling the scouting on any given day. Her players love to bring up how she pours into them. She mentions specific members of the practice squad by name in national press conferences. There is so much talk of belief and love here that it could be tedious if it did not seem so sincere.
“It takes a village to build a program,” Close said later on the dais, trophy by her side.
It can take a village to win a game, too. No. 1 overall seed UCLA made it to the Elite Eight because of how it plays around All-American center Lauren Betts. It made it out because of how it can play without her.
Facing the No. 3 seed LSU Tigers on Sunday, UCLA could not muster its usual dominance in the paint. Betts was forced to the bench early with uncharacteristic foul trouble. Even when she was on the floor, she was never quite able to get comfortable, double-teamed and stymied by a tough defense from LSU. And there was similarly little room to maneuver for the rest of this frontcourt. UCLA had its worst two-point shooting percentage of any game all season at 35.5%.
The Bruins still led for most of the afternoon. They lost the battle for rebounds (43 to 38) and points in the paint (26 to 16), yet they won the game, 72–65. This is not exactly how they like to operate, but they can if they must.
“This is what we’re talking about when we have a deep team,” Betts said. “I don’t have to be in the game at all times.”
Betts had what might qualify as a very solid game for nearly any other player in the country. She finished with 17 points, seven rebounds and six blocks in 25 minutes. But that is not what the Bruins have come to expect from Betts. Nearly all of their major successes here this season have flowed through her: Betts was the leading scorer in UCLA’s first three NCAA tournament games, and she was on the floor nearly every minute of their biggest wins earlier this year, against the South Carolina Gamecocks and USC Trojans. The Bruins generally win by playing through Betts.
They certainly do not win by playing with her on the bench for the entire second quarter. But they had little choice Sunday: Betts picked up two fouls in a first quarter that UCLA finished trailing by four points. Her coach knew that she would have to sit. “Every game is going to create [a] sort of chaos,” Close said. This was one the team had not faced much this season.
It was one that the coach believed the Bruins could handle. They had spoken all year about the importance of every last member of the roster and what it meant to be selfless and stay ready to execute when called upon. Now they had a chance to prove it.
UCLA outscored LSU without Betts in the second quarter by a margin of 22–12.
“The game was lost in the second quarter,” said LSU coach Kim Mulkey. “That’s where the game was lost. We didn’t capitalize on Betts being off the floor.”
LSU instead found itself outshot by reserve guard Timea Gardiner, who finished with five threes, and Gabriela Jaquez, who had four and led the Bruins in points with 18. If the Bruins could not do their usual work inside, fine, Close would have them work outside.
The Bruins will not be able to cut down another net without major contributions from Betts. Yet they will not be able to do it without the rest of their roster, either, and Close asked more of them on Sunday than in any game so far in this NCAA tournament.
“You can make up sayings all the time, you can put stuff on the back of your shirts, you can put it up on the wall,” Close said. “But it doesn't mean anything if it doesn't influence behavior.” This is her 14th season of building that village at UCLA. It is the first time she has gotten a chance to cut down these nets.
“All these people want to get on board with something that’s going to last,” says Patti Close, who placed the bit of the net that her daughter gave her in her pocket with some confetti for safekeeping. “Not just winning basketball games.”
Her daughter built something that now has both.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as UCLA Shows It Is More Than Just Lauren Betts.
