After a Hard Reset, UCLA Decided to Win a National Championship on Its Own Terms

Many doubted if the happy-go-lucky Bruins were tough enough to win it all. It turns out they had so much heart for each other that they played heartlessly against their opponents.

PHOENIX — Everything the UCLA Bruins had done, thought, believed, tried, failed to do and tried to do again for the past year came down to this: Under championship pressure, when every possession could make or ruin their day, could the Bruins come through against mighty South Carolina?

We will never find out. The Bruins did such a good job of steeling themselves for big moments that they never faced one. Kind of a shame, really. But at least they won the national championship. 

UCLA obliterated the Gamecocks, 79–51. The Bruins did what very few teams can even imagine doing: They broke South Carolina’s will. They set their own FRAGILE label on fire. Everyone knew the Bruins were great, but who knew they could play so ruthlessly?  

Jordan Naholowaa Murph/Sports Illustrated

They did. Point guard Kiki Rice said she knew it would be UCLA’s day “as we came out for warmups.” The Bruins took a 36–23 lead into the locker room at halftime and told each other: It’s 0–0. Then they extended the lead to 61–30.

The closest the Bruins came to choking was when star Lauren Betts had something stuck in her throat. She still doesn’t know what it was. Perhaps UCLA devoured South Carolina too quickly. Betts said afterward that “it’s kind of scary when you’re running and you feel like you can’t breathe,” and she actually asked to come out of the game to deal with it. Trainers gave her a cough drop and nasal spray. Betts said that “I think it was the cough drop that saved the day,” but then, nobody who gets nasal spray ever wants more nasal spray.

The Bruins were so dominant that the only question in the fourth quarter was whether they are one of the best teams of all-time. They did lose once, to Texas in November. But after that, the Bruins went on a 18-week tear that rivals any in the sport’s history.

Coming into Sunday, they won 30 straight games, with an average margin of victory of 29 points. They went 11–0 against teams that would earn top-four seeds in the NCAA tournament. In those 11 games, they never trailed in the fourth quarter, trailed in the third quarter only once, and trailed in the second quarter only twice. Their average margin of victory was 19 points. 

The Bruins arrived in Phoenix for arguably the most loaded Final Four in history: Four No. 1 seeds, all of them playing in their second straight Final Four. UConn, South Carolina, Texas and UCLA went 140–3 against the rest of the country this season. Yet UCLA was far and away the best team in the Final Four. Texas scored the first basket against the Bruins in their semifinal and held that 2–0 lead for 54 seconds. The Bruins never trailed again all weekend. The only thing that was tight this weekend was their team.

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UCLA coach Cori Close talks like she gets paid by the affirmation. Every moment is an OTS: Opportunity to Serve. Every day is a chance to connect, to be intentional, to develop “habits of excellence,” to learn how to “live in tension” between conflicting emotions. 

Close tells her players: “Wounds are deeper than convictions. If you don’t deal with your wounds, they overpower your convictions.” She says, “Success leaves clues.” She says as a coach, “you have to really choose to be transformational.” She quotes UCLA legend John Wooden: “The biggest form of partiality is to treat everyone the same.”

After most UCLA practices, the Bruins gather together for a session called What Went Well. Close believes women are too hard on themselves. She wants to “interrupt the negative loop.” Close built a national power using this approach. The Bruins made their first NCAA Final Four last season. Then they got smoked by UConn, and Betts and Rice jumped onto the negative loop and rode it until they were sick.

Cori Close has been committed to running the program on her on terms, and after 15 seasons that has finally paid off. | Jordan Naholowaa Murph/Sports Illustrated

Betts and Rice watched the UConn game so many times, their coaches finally had to beg them to stop. The truth is they didn’t have to watch it at all. It was obvious during the game that UCLA was not nearly as mentally tough as UConn.

It is a testament to Close’s character that nobody ever seems to call her a phony. The way she speaks in front of cameras is how she speaks to her players in private. The way she speaks to her players is how she speaks to her coaches. Everything that she sells, she has already bought a thousand times herself.

Anybody in college basketball will tell you: You would want your kid playing for Cori Close. She checks in with her players so often that guard Charlisse Leger-Walker says “she’s kind of like that invested auntie that is always hovering. She just cares so much.” UCLA assistant coach Tasha Brown said Saturday that the Bruins “want to keep playing because they want more days together.”

It’s an endearing way to do business. But after the UConn debacle, a question loomed: Could a team win a championship this way?

Close believed it could. She would coach this team the only way she knew how: lovingly. The season’s buzzword was reset. Make a mistake? Fall behind? Get destroyed by UConn in the Final Four? Reset.

Adding to the challenge: The Bruins knew that against most opponents, they could coast for a few minutes and win anyway. They have talent upon talent upon talent, which is also a product of the Close way.

Kiki Rice (right) was one of five seniors who started for the Bruins this season. | Jordan Naholowaa Murph/Sports Illustrated

Rice won national player of the year awards in high school. Two years into her UCLA career, she was a really good player but not quite a star. She had WNBA dreams and potential. That offseason, Rice recruited Leger-Walker out of the transfer portal. Leger-Walker is older than Rice. She had started more college games at Washington State than Rice had started at UCLA and scored more points, albeit for a lesser team. Rice wanted her anyway.

The UCLA coaches kept dangling the challenge in front of their players, daring them to play a complete game.

“What do we look like if we play 40 minutes of us?” Brown said. “Not perfectly. But 40 minutes of toughness at our standard and resetting quickly. Don’t you want to know what that looks like?”

They knew what it did not look like. In the Elite Eight, the Bruins made a mess of their first half against a very good and well-coached Duke team. It was a mess they could clean up, but it was still a mess. Brown said on the bench, “We’re like, ‘O.K., what are we doing? That doesn’t look like anything that we talked about.’ ”

Halftime was revealing: As the coaches met separately, players admonished themselves for being slow to get back on defense and veering from the scouting report. Then they reset. We got this. Before Close addressed them, she asked the questions she always asks: “What did you guys talk about? What solutions did you find?” They told her. Then they beat the Blue Devils by 12. It was time to face the superpowers. 

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UCLA’s win over Texas was so ugly that Close jokingly apologized for it afterward. But it was a good ugly. The Longhorns are as tough as any team in the country, and UCLA demoralized them. Lauren Betts demoralized them.

Betts is a force that has to be seen to be appreciated. She is six-foot-seven, but as big as you think she is, she plays bigger. As good as you think she is defensively, she is better. As much as you think she gets beaten up, she gets beaten up more. When UCLA runs sprint drills, Betts often finishes ahead of guards. Teams sometimes try to force Betts to defend quick players on the perimeter, figuring nobody that size can possibly keep guards in front of her. But she usually does.

“It’s so hard to guard [Lauren],” South Carolina’s Madina Okot said of Betts (shooting). “I feel like we tried. If you’re guarding her, you just want to pay attention to guarding her. But once you start trying to help your guards, that is when she kills you.” | Jordan Naholowaa Murph/Sports Illustrated

By the end of the Texas game, Betts was so far inside the Longhorns’ heads that she could have taken their final exams for them. Nobody stopped Texas star Madison Booker all year. She was 3-for-23 shooting against UCLA. Booker’s last shot was a contorting backward attempt that looked like she forgot the goal is to put the ball in the basket and just wanted to keep Betts from blocking her shot. Betts blocked it anyway.

Betts’s effect on the program is similar to her effect on the court: People feel her nearby, even when she isn’t. She is an extremely talented, highly competitive player who has absolutely no interest in drawing attention to herself. She also understands herself well enough to know that she is at her best when she is not thinking about being at her best. She plays like Close coaches: Every moment is an Opportunity to Serve.

After a miserable freshman year at Stanford, Betts was so happy at UCLA that her highly recruited younger sister Sienna joined the Bruins this season.

“She’s given me a whole different perspective on basketball,” Lauren said. “I’ve truly never enjoyed playing this much in my life, and I think it has to do with the fact that she’s here.”

It’s nice to bring in a five-star recruit who makes your best player enjoy the game more. It’s also nice to have a five-star recruit coming off the bench: When Lauren needs a breather, Sienna waits for you.

But when Lauren can’t breathe, her little sister gets concerned. Here it was, the tension between conflicting emotions, the moment that would answer the question that loomed over Close’s program: Were the Bruins too committed to their family atmosphere to win a championship?

Sienna asked people on the UCLA bench what was bothering Lauren. She never got an answer.

“Every time I tried to ask them,” Sienna said, “it was like, ‘NO!’ ”

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The Bruins are a tight-knit team that like to have fun, as exemplified by Gabriela Jaquez, Lauren Betts and Charlisse Leger-Walker (left to right) showing off a dance routine throughout the tournament. | Jordan Naholowaa Murph/Sports Illustrated

One cough drop later, Lauren went back in the game. This time, the Gamecocks were the ones screaming “NO!”

 South Carolina’s Madina Okot is 6-foot-6, just an inch shorter than Betts, with a muscular frame and reputation for playing powerful defense. Theoretically, Okot gave South Carolina the best possible matchup against Betts. Okot picked up three fouls in 13 minutes and spent the rest of the game on the bench.

“It’s so hard to guard her,” Okot said. “I feel like we tried. If you’re guarding her, you just want to pay attention to guarding her. But once you start trying to help your guards, that is when she kills you.”

South Carolina coach Dawn Staley said after the title game: “You have to navigate differently. You can't go in there thinking you can score over her or through her, so sometimes you have to go in there and draw and kick, maybe draw and kick another time. We actually wanted to do that.”

According to the analytics firm that UCLA uses, South Carolina was the best team in the country this season at finishing at the rim. UCLA was the best team at protecting it. South Carolina shot 29% in the title game. We now know which best is actually best.

In its second Final Four appearance, UCLA captured its first NCAA championship in program history. | Jordan Naholowaa Murph/Sports Illustrated

The Bruins never had to reset against South Carolina. But they kept doing it anyway.  This was a huggers’ butt-kicking, a beatdown from a bunch of lifter-uppers, proof you can say you’re not O.K. and still make others feel a whole lot worse.

Four great teams arrived in Phoenix, but only UCLA rose like one. The Bruins are national champions. Betts was the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player, an announcement that surprised only her. She started to cry and sounded like she had something in her throat. She reset.

What went well?

What didn’t?

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