Bruins make best of strange season
Team bonding has taken on a new dimension in Pandemic Basketball. Creating exercises to bring players together becomes a challenge when players can’t actually gather away from the court because of COVID-19 protocols.
UCLA’s women’s team has, by the description of coach Cori Close, been strict when it comes to observing the new normal. That should put the Bruins in good stead heading into what she termed the “quasi-bubble” of the NCAA Tournament, which in the women’s case will be held completely in the San Antonio area.
“That’s been one of the biggest challenges in traveling this year,” she said. “That’s when you create all the camaraderie, the memories and the really fun experiences and unusual experiences that we try to create. And we haven’t been able to do that.
“The student-athletes have shown just incredible toughness and focus, because the reality is that it’s not as fun as it’s been in the past. The most that we get to experience together is at practice and at games, and so I do think it’s really different.”
How do you surmount that? How about a cookoff? Seriously.
“That’s all Charisma (Osborne),” Close said, citing the Bruins’ sophomore guard from Moreno Valley
by way of Windward High School in L.A.
“We asked the team, ‘Look, y’all, what gets your hearts and minds ready? What can we do as a team that’s COVID-safe and that we can do that stays within our protocols?’ Charisma came up with this ‘Top Chef’ cookoff idea within the team and she did all the organizing. She came up with how the contest was going to work. We all had to be masked. We had all the windows open and ate outside.
“And I was the beneficiary of getting to eat from it.”
The coach didn’t specify who won last weekend’s competition, but Osborne’s tweet included #WinningTeam, which might be a hint.
Regardless, it was a rare opportunity for one of those occasions when players could hang out away from the court or weight room or classroom and strengthen those bonds that can be so beneficial on the court.
It had to suffice. Unlike some teams that assembled en masse for Monday night’s selection show, the Bruins who could do so watched from their rooms and Zoomed or FaceTimed each other. This is finals week at UCLA, at the end of the winter quarter, and players themselves decided that academic success trumped 15 to 30 seconds of cheering and dancing for the ESPN cameras. (It’s a small price to pay considering the frequency with which UCLA players have to take proctored exams from the road, since NCAA Tournament schedules often clash with their finals.)
Like so many other programs across the nation, these Bruins missed out a year ago. The 2019-20 Bruins were 26-5 then, ranked 10th in the AP poll and ninth in the USA Today coaches poll, and almost certainly would have hosted the first two rounds of the regionals in Pauley Pavilion had they taken place.
These Bruins, a No. 3 regional seed going into Monday’s first-round game against Wyoming, are 165, ranked ninth in both polls and have a NET ranking of 8, while playing with a nine-woman roster. They lost the Pac-12 Tournament final to Stanford 75-55 after splitting two regular-season meetings with the Cardinal, and keep in mind that Tara Vanderveer’s team enters the NCAA Tournament as the overall No. 1 seed.
“When we came back (from the conference tournament), we had a players’ meeting, just to talk about refocusing and just blowing wind into each others’ sails,” senior guard Natalie Chou said. “I think our captains did a great job leading us through that and saying, ‘Yeah, that was a really tough game, but we also have so much basketball to go through.’ We have to learn from Stanford, or else that loss — we’ll continue to lose if we don’t learn from it,”
Losses at the right time can be beneficial. This was one of John Wooden’s beliefs, and Close has carried Wooden’s wisdom throughout her coaching career, dating to when she was a graduate assistant at UCLA from 1993-95. A meeting with Wooden, arranged by then-men’s assistant Steve Lavin, turned into regular Tuesday night visits that continued even after Close returned to alma mater UC Santa Barbara as an assistant to that university’s own coaching legend, Mark French.
And while Wooden’s Pyramid of Success is an integral part of the UCLA identity, it has an especially prominent role in Close’s program.
“The biggest thing I take from my time with him is, he never veered from being process-oriented,” she said this week. “Even just his definition of competitive greatness, which is at the top of the pyramid, is to be able to give your best when your best is needed. It wasn’t winning the game.
“Or the definition of success is peace of mind, knowing that you’ve done your very best. People think, ‘Oh, that must mean that winning’s not important to you.’ No, it doesn’t (mean that). I just am such a firm believer that ... if you’re thinking about, ‘I got to get to the Final Four, I got to win a national championship,’ if you have one eye on that, that means you only have one eye on what it takes to actually get there. And we want to build the habits in our young women that we fall in love with the process of what it takes to become great.
“We really try to never waver from that and always tell our players, ‘If you’ve done everything under your control to master your craft and be an elite teammate, then you need to be able to surrender the results and play (with) freedom.”
A corollary to that might be refusing to let your environment affect you. Under current protocols, that might be more important than ever.