Months before cutting down the nets in Phoenix, the UCLA boss sat down with EssentiallySports and explained the philosophy that carried the Bruins to history.
When the buzzer sounded in Phoenix on April 5, Cori Close had delivered what no UCLA women’s basketball coach ever had. A 79-51 rout of South Carolina gave the Bruins the first NCAA championship in program history. It capped a 37-1 season that included a 31-game winning streak and an unbeaten run through the Big Ten.
A month later, UCLA made sure she wasn’t going anywhere. Close signed a contract extension that keeps her in Westwood through the 2029-30 season.
Months before any of it happened, Close told EssentiallySports how she planned to get there. She didn’t talk about winning. She talked about what winning is for.
“The biggest thing for me and my philosophy is that I want it to be about more than basketball. In the end, banners hang in gyms and rings collect dust. And as important as competitive excellence is to me, it’s more important to provide for players things that last. The only two things they get to keep for the rest of their lives from these four years is who they become and who they impact. Nobody can take that away from them. It’s completely under their control, and it’s something that they get to keep forever.”
A banner now hangs in Pauley Pavilion. The coach who put character first ended up with the hardware anyway, which would not have surprised her greatest mentor.
“Coach Wooden used to say, ‘Remember, Cori, you’re not coaching people’s jump shots, you’re coaching people’s hearts.’ But then with his big blue eyes, he’d usually wink and go, ‘But if you coach their hearts really well, usually their jump shots end up pretty good too.’ And that’s what I want to be about.”
A title she refused to promise
We spoke to Close in the thick of the season, with the Bruins flying and her name already on the Naismith Coach of the Year watch list. She was open about the weight of expectation around the final collegiate campaign of Lauren Betts and Kiki Rice.
“I’ve been fighting this inner battle. That’s their dream, and my job is to help them be dream chasers. I want them to be rewarded for all that they’ve given to this program, to me, to our community. I don’t want to let them down. I wanna be all that they need me to be this year to put them in a position to be successful. And I want them to not be defined by 40 minutes.”
Then she described the only kind of championship she was interested in.
“I want it to be that they jumped in so selflessly to present focus and growth and being a sacrificial teammate, that their success to win a national championship just is a destiny because of all the commitment they’ve made to the process. Anything less than that, I think, is gonna be really shallow.”
That is the championship she got. The fuel behind it was painful. The Bruins’ 2025 Final Four loss to UConn was still raw when we spoke.
“We got our butts kicked, and I think that hurt. You either have pain of discipline or pain of regret. And I think unfortunately, we have pain of regret. But fortunately, we’re using that to really increase the pain of discipline, which I think will pay dividends down the road.”
The dividend came twelve months later, by 28 points, in a national final.
The servant leader with a broom on her wall
What separates Close from the chasing pack isn’t scheme. It’s how diligently she studies leadership itself. There is a broom mounted on her office wall, a nod to the All Blacks rugby dynasty in the book Legacy, whose executives and captains sweep their own locker room after every match.
“The thing I really took from that is that their executives and their captains sweep the sheds every day. I really wanna be a servant leader. I don’t want that to be a coined thing that everyone talks about. I want it to be really lived out, that I see each day as, how can I serve my staff and my team?”
She studies the best across sports. Wooden, of course, but also Erik Spoelstra, Steve Kerr, and Rams head coach Sean McVay, who she has grown close to over the past 18 months. McVay even opened his doors to Kiki Rice, who wants to be a GM one day, for a two-day look at how a professional organization runs.
“Success leaves clues, and I wanna get all the clues I can to help me be the best leader I can be. I just have a passion for leadership. Regardless of the environment or landscape in which you lead, if you’re influencing people well and serving people well, I wanna learn from you.”
The mental side gets the same attention. Her “mind gym” sessions with the team’s mental conditioning coach put a real curriculum behind an idea most coaches only pay lip service to.
“It’s obviously a catchphrase to say pressure is a privilege, and we say it too. But then what? Okay, pressure is a privilege. We’ve earned the right to feel this. But now how do we channel it so that it helps us be the best version of ourselves? If you ask any basketball player what percentage of the game is mental versus physical, they’re all gonna say 75, 80, 90 percent mental. But then if you ask them, the last time you went to the gym, what percentage of your workout was based on the mental side? Mostly they didn’t know how. No one’s given them the tools.”
Reload, not rebuild
Close knew this roster teardown was coming. Asked about life after Betts and Rice, the focus was clear.
“We are obviously in a situation, in a new era, that we are gonna be looking to reload, not rebuild. We are gonna look to aggressively seek elite talent from the portal to really build that puzzle again that has these complementary pieces that can lead to a championship. We’re just trying to strategically position ourselves so that we have a chance to compete for the best talent in the portal.”
Then she went out and did it. UCLA made WNBA Draft history in April with six players selected, including a record five first-rounders, the most ever by one school. Within weeks, Close landed KK Bransford from Notre Dame, Addy Brown from Iowa State, Donovyn Hunter from TCU, Elina Aarnisalo from North Carolina, and Bonnie Deas from Arkansas, one of the strongest portal hauls in the country. The Spanish guard she teased in our conversation, Somto Okafor, arrives this fall, and this week the Bruins added Slovenian guard Lina Jerkovic to round out the class.
Then there’s the returner, Close lit up about most: Sienna Betts. Lauren’s little sister, and, per her coach, possibly the funniest player she has ever had.
“Sienna has a bigger personality than Lauren, actually. Sienna is her own person, and she has her own journey. Sienna might go down as maybe the top five funniest players I’ve had in 33 years. She is hilarious. I don’t think there’s any problem with managing the locker room. If anything, Sienna’s running the locker room.”
With Sienna now headlining a returning core that includes Lena Bilić and fifth-year forward Timea Gardiner, the locker room belongs to her.
Early national rankings have the defending champs outside the top tier for 2026-27, with an entirely new starting lineup to forge. Close has heard worse. When she arrived in Westwood in 2011, she was told Los Angeles might never care about women’s basketball. In April, thousands packed Pauley Pavilion for the championship celebration and chanted her name.
When we asked what it means to be UCLA, her answer doubled as a recruiting pitch for the next era.
“One of the best parts of being the coach of the UCLA Bruins is I get to look a parent in the eye and go, name another place that’s gonna give you the academics that we can give you, the access to the alumni network, the competitive excellence, the NIL package, the opportunities above the NIL package, because we’re in Los Angeles. And most importantly, where else can you go that’s gonna take such an intentional approach about investing in your daughter from the inside out?”
The banner is up. The rings are on six pairs of professional hands. And the coach who insisted those things matter least has four more years to chase what she values most.
Quotes from an exclusive EssentiallySports interview with Cori Close conducted during the 2025-26 season, prior to UCLA’s national championship.
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