SPOKANE, Wash. — UCLA has won 124 national championships in school history. The women’s basketball team comes into its home gym of Pauley Pavilion and sees banners for 11 men’s basketball titles, nine gymnastics championships and 25 national titles for volleyball.
It’s a seemingly impossible legacy to live up to, but one the Bruins women’s basketball team has never shied away from chasing. It’s one step closer to clearing a space of its own in that hallowed gym after a 72-65 win over LSU to send the Bruins to their first Final Four in NCAA Tournament history.
“Everyone came to UCLA for this reason, to do something we haven’t done,” junior Gabriela Jaquez said. “Proud of my teammates, the staff, the coaches for just continuing to get better every day and grow.”
This milestone has been a long time coming for the program, which experienced success in the AIAW era — a title in 1978 and another final four in 1979 — but had yet to translate it into the modern era of the NCAA Tournament. For decades, women’s basketball has been an afterthought in the Bruins’ athletic powerhouse.
UCLA took a chance on Cori Close, then a longtime assistant coach at UC Santa Barbara and Florida State, in 2011. The administration believed she could elevate the program with her mission to build “an elite program that teaches, mentors and equips women for life beyond college.”
Who doesn’t love confetti ?! 🎉 @UCLAWBB#MarchMadness x #WFinalFourpic.twitter.com/0iRsRfmich
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessWBB) March 30, 2025
Assistant coach Tony Newnan was semiretired, selling real estate in Santa Barbara when he got the call to join Close, who had coached with him on the Gauchos staff. Shannon LeBeauf was a rising coaching star who had worked with multiple national players of the year at Duke when she chose to help a first-time head coach build a foundation in Los Angeles. LeBeauf said she would have gotten out of coaching if she hadn’t felt fully in sync with the process. Both have stayed with Close for the entirety of her UCLA tenure.
“I had a vision and I believed in surrounding myself with people that were smarter than me and that would be aligned in that vision, but they still had to take a risk on me,” Close said. “That’s not an easy risk to take when someone’s unproven, and I’ll be eternally grateful for that risk that they took.”
The early returns for the Close era were promising on the court. The Bruins brought in the No. 1 recruiting class in 2014. That group won the WNIT as freshmen, went to the NCAA Sweet 16 the ...
