Alexander: No. 1 UCLA women find the gym as a refuge
To the casual observer, or at least one paying only partial attention, UCLA’s women’s basketball team is a juggernaut. The men might currently be driving Mick Cronin crazy with their play, but Cori Close’s women’s team has vanquished all comers, is ranked No.1 in the nation and seems to be upholding the late John Wooden’s standards in a way the men haven’t been.
Which hasn’t stopped Close from laying down the law occasionally when warranted. As she put it the other day, when the little things are done sloppily or ineffectively, “It’s my job to make that hurt (in practice and film sessions) when the score doesn’t make it hurt.”
After all, the mistakes that are overriden by talent in January aren’t as easy to paper over in March.
But coaching handbooks likely don’t provide much advice for dealing with real life crises, such as the wildfires that have turned parts of L.A. city and county into disaster areas – especially when one of those areas is uncomfortably close to campus.
“It’s obviously devastating, just how close it is to us and seeing (how) a lot of people close to this program have lost homes and have lost a lot of stuff in this fire,” guard Kiki Rice said Friday, during a Zoom session that replaced the program’s usual Friday afternoon media availability. “So it’s, really, praying for everyone and everyone’s safety.”
But, she added, she and her teammates “get to come out here, still play basketball, still do what we we love. Our school’s OK. Facilities are OK. And so I think (we’re) just reminding ourselves of that and I think we’re focused on continuing forward with the season and doing what we can, while also just thinking of everyone else who’s going through tough times right now.”
There are times when the lessons from the practice floor are equally applicable to life away from the gym, even if it doesn’t seem that way at the time they’re imparted. And there are times, such as this, when the gym itself is a refuge.
The Bruins will have more time to figure things out. Originally scheduled to play Sunday afternoon in Pauley Pavilion against Northwestern, they wound up with an open date when the Big Ten announced Friday afternoon that Northwestern would not make its West Coast trip to play the Bruins or USC on Wednesday. Those games will be rescheduled some time this season.
Conditions permitting, UCLA’s next scheduled game is Wednesday night at home against Penn State. But at this point, everything remains tentative.
For Los Angeles teams, pro and college, the schedule fallout from the fire is reminiscent of the bad old days of the COVID-19 pandemic, with games postponed, rescheduled and in some cases added on the fly, as well as college campuses closed and classes either canceled or held remotely.
“We’ve already known how to pivot,” Close said. “That’s what Pam (Walker, director of operations) and I said to each other (Thursday) night. We said, ‘This is what we do. We find a way. We can’t control this, but this is – we know how to do this. We know how to lead through this.’
“And I guess that’s one of the unintended consequences of going through the pandemic, is that I have a lot of confidence in how to lead through these scenarios because we had more shutdowns and time away from campus than any other university in the entire Division I. And I also believe our players are well equipped.”
An example: The Bruins’ bus driver got lost and the Bruins were late getting to Assembly Hall for their game against Indiana. And Close said she thought the players handled it with more equanimity than she did.
“I heard Kiki being like, ‘We’re built for this, we got this, we’ll make it work,’” Close said.
When your players express such sentiments, isn’t that half the battle?
Friday’s was UCLA’s first practice since coming back from a road trip Tuesday night, following a sweep of Indiana and Purdue. By then, of course, flames were already cutting a swath through Pacific Palisades.
Players attended in-person classes Wednesday and Thursday, but UCLA canceled in-person undergraduate classes Thursday night and Friday.
“We’ve only been talking with each other over the phone or FaceTime,” Close said. “But we gave them space right away. We took two days off and just tried to (regroup), even our staff. We had nightly check-ins to make sure everybody was OK.
“But that was one of the things we said after practice (Friday): ‘You know what? We still get to play the sport we love.’ And just because there’s so much hurt going on right now, and difficulty, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still find joy in playing this game that we love and (being) committed to that.
“… I do think there’s some anxiety there, no question. But our out-of-state (players), we’ve just tried to communicate with the parents that we’re safe.”
Rice is a junior from Bethesda, Md., and didn’t grow up with fire season as did teammate Gabriela Jaquez, a fellow junior from Camarillo. If you grow up here, or really anywhere in California, you get it, though even for locals and natives a firestorm of this magnitude is hard to fathom.
Either way, it’s bizarre and scary. And for those who can, retreating to the normal parts of life provides a refuge.
“We’re praying for all the people affected and we feel very sorry and we’re so sad,” Jaquez said. “It’s so tragic. But I think me personally, being from Southern California, having dealt with plenty of fires in the past, I feel like I found a way to handle it.”
jalexander@scng.com