The relative continuity in women's college basketball makes it fun to get sentimental: Oh, look how tall you’ve grown! Do you remember me? The last time I saw you, when you were a freshman, you were just thiiiiiis big. These days, the team sending me into wistful aunt mode most often is No. 1 UCLA, whom I last blogged two seasons ago, back when I was still figuring out how to cover regular-season college basketball here and back when their young players were still figuring out how to play college basketball. Those Bruins ran on both pluck and pedigree; their highly ranked freshman class had just helped them upset the field to win a wacky Feast Week tournament in the Bahamas. On Tuesday night, moving to 16-0 on the season with a drama-free 83-49 rout of Purdue, they were pedigree realized—and definitely post-pluck.
Even the thiiiiiis big version of UCLA was pretty tall. Kiki Rice, 5-foot-11 and the No. 2 recruit in her class, has brought the Bruins rare size and strength at point guard for the last three seasons. But after UCLA’s Sweet Sixteen loss to South Carolina in Rice’s freshman year, the Bruins grew even taller by picking up 6-foot-7 transfer Lauren Betts. Betts, a casualty of the Great Stanford Frontcourt Logjam of 2021-23, was the No. 1 recruit in Rice’s class, and she gave the already-interesting Bruins a real anchor on both sides of the floor. UCLA and USC won't meet to hash this out until Feb. 13, but Betts deserves at least as much Big Ten Player of the Year and National Player of the Year talk as JuJu Watkins. The entire team operates in her orbit, and they have all grown into the hype.
As a freshman at Stanford, Betts could sometimes look lumbering, and though she might seem for the Cardinal like "the one who got away" now, it wasn't too hard to see why she fell below the more mobile Cameron Brink and Kiki Iriafen on the depth chart. Since coming to UCLA, though, she's been able to play a lot faster. With her smart decisions in the post, she's beaten the "not good, just big" allegations. A double- and triple-teamed Betts has no trouble quickly finding cutters to the basket or kicking passes outside to what is this year a much improved collection of shooters.
Betts's midrange touch—or the driving lanes it opens—has also made the Bruins one of the most efficient teams in the country. It doesn't feel like a coincidence that Rice has broken out this season, becoming the kind of downhill threat a player with her speed ought to be. With the help of screen assists from Betts, the point guard is shooting 64.7 percent from two this year, way up from 50 percent last year. Just about everyone on the roster has taken a similar offensive leap. Wing Gabriela Jaquez, so fast the softball team recruited her to pinch-run in the NCAA Super Regionals, is shooting 66.7 percent from two so far, up from 57 percent last year. The 6-foot-4 Angela Dugalić always pops when I'm watching UCLA; she's upped her two-point percentage from 38.4 last year to 55.9 percent now. And just in terms of cleaning up turnovers and getting the ball inside to Betts more reliably, the Bruins seem so much more comfortable moving the ball around than they did a year ago.
On defense, they're just as overwhelming. Betts scares opponents out of the paint. Londynn Jones, small but mighty, scraps for steals. Rice can switch onto basically anyone, as can Texas A&M transfer Janiah Barker, who has managed to get a few double-doubles off the bench. This might all sound a little familiar to you: a big, fast, rebound-minded team built around an unstoppable 6-foot-7 center, deep in the frontcourt, and rich with athletic wings? When the Bruins snapped South Carolina's 43-game win streak just before Thanksgiving with a 77-62 win at home, they showed that it is, in fact, possible to out-Gamecock the Gamecocks.
Unlike the Gamecocks of late, none of head coach Cori Close’s recent teams has made it out of the Sweet Sixteen. The bracket hasn’t been especially kind, matching them up against reigning champions in back-to-back tournaments. In last year's tournament, LSU neutralized the Bruins' advantages, cutting off lanes to Betts and getting the team into foul trouble late. Rice, who was followed by an ESPN documentary crew that season, remembered feeling helpless on the bench in the final quarter. But senior Camryn Brown was more optimistic when the team huddled after the loss. “Hey, this program is in damn good hands,” Brown told them. “And I know y’all are going to finish it off next year for us, OK?” She knew that they only had a little more growing up to do.
