UCLA women's basketball regained its focus to set sights on national championship

UCLA's Lauren Betts celebrates and screams out toward the crowd after the Bruins beat Texas in the Final Four. Ben Solomon / Getty Images Share full articlePHOENIX — Lauren Betts watched the game film of UCLA’s 2025 Final Four defeat to UConn about a dozen times. She was mad and couldn’t understand how a historic season for the program had ended in such catastrophic fashion. It took double-digit viewings to finally let the 34-point national semifinal loss go, to turn the page and figure out how to be better for the team during her senior season. Everyone on the Bruins had her own way of moving past what happened last year in Tampa, Fla. Kiki Rice joined Betts in watching the game back a few times. Coach Cori Close asked the players to forgive her for screwing up. Gabriela Jaquez focused on taking care of the ball and performing in special situations. Angela Dugalić wanted to be a more selfless teammate. UCLA has a saying that “the tougher, more together team wins.” They didn’t feel like they met either of those goals at the end of their 2024-25 season. The magnitude of the Final Four overwhelmed UCLA. Rice admitted the stage was hard when she hadn’t been there before. Dugalić referenced the adage of the lights being too bright. When the Huskies hit them, the Bruins stumbled and couldn’t adjust. For the 2025-26 season, UCLA had the talent, and it would have experience on its side with six seniors in the rotation. Mental preparation has been a primary focus for the team since the Bruins began spring workouts, and their success on that front has the program playing for its first national championship in the NCAA era. Even during a slog of a game in Friday’s 51-44 Final Four victory against fellow No. 1 seed Texas, it was clear that the Bruins’ thoughts were trained on a common goal. Now, they train their thoughts on Sunday, when they face No. 1 seed South Carolina for the tournament crown. “We do so much mental work,” Betts said postgame. “We’re constantly trying to improve our mental space and our mental toughness.” Assistant Tasha Brown is in charge of the UCLA’s mind gym, making sure every player can reset after an adverse situation and move on. Each Bruins player has her own reset routine: some are verbal, others visual. Jaquez regulates her breathing. Everyone on the team knows the others’ routine so they can help them through it. Brown is often seen on the bench during games making a hand motion to remind the players of their process. They know they won’t be perfect, but they have to continue playing. When UCLA looked back at last season’s loss against UConn and its regular-season defeat to Texas, the theme that emerged was disappointment that they didn’t compete for 40 minutes. It’s one thing to have all the tools, but then the real work began with the Final Four. Even though the first item on the game plan was to take care of the ball, the Bruins couldn’t stop turning it over, giving it away 23 times to Texas. How does mental preparation carry over when UCLA is making the same mistake again and again? “Every single practice throughout the past few years, we’ve been doing a thing called special situations, different things, whether we’re down three or up nine, just putting ourselves in those positions to see how we’re going to react,” Dugalić said. “We were built for the moment.” When Gianna Kneepkens overthrew Lauren Betts on a transition attempt, the Bruins reset and forced a miss on the next play. When Dugalić lost the ball on a tie-up with Madison Booker, she responded with a block on Ashton Judd the next time down. The mistakes kept coming, but so did the proper reactions. The Bruins kept their circle small, focusing on things that they could individually control. The arc of this season has been about resetting from the loss to the Huskies. The way UCLA has prepared, the way Rice and Jaquez have developed their mental toughness for the last four years, bore out despite more tests than they could have ever hoped for. Rice knew she didn’t have her best game in the Elite Eight, when she shot 2 of 10 from the field and had the ball in her hands for three separate shot-clock violations. Her teammates knew they would see a different version of her Friday, and Rice individually reset with 11 points, five rebounds, a block and a steal. Kneepkens couldn’t hit a shot in the regional round in Sacramento, but focused her reset effort on the defensive end rather than her scoring. She was part of a collective defensive performance on Madison Booker that limited the first-team All-American to 3-of-23 shooting. “My mindset going in is I wanted to be super aggressive on the defensive end,” Kneepkens said. “Shots are going to go in, they’re not going to go in sometimes. If you play with your mind like that, basketball is not so fun.” It would be generous to describe the performance UCLA put forth against Texas as fun, but it got the job done. Despite the turnovers, despite letting a 13-point lead with 4:36 to play whittle down to three, the Bruins had the fortitude to emerge with a victory. After losing to UConn last April, Betts said, “We need to show up more prepared and ready to win. And that has nothing to do with the coaches. That’s everything to do with us. … I hope this fuels us and I hope that we come out angry.” Betts and the Bruins felt that anger. They sat in it, they worked through it, and they figured out how to move forward from it. And now they’re moving another step forward into the national championship game. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Sabreena Merchant is a women's basketball Staff Writer for The Athletic. She previously covered the WNBA and NBA for SB Nation. Sabreena is an alum of Duke University, where she wrote for the independent student newspaper, The Chronicle. She is based in Los Angeles. Follow Sabreena on Twitter @sabreenajm