It hasn’t been a normal week for the UCLA women’s basketball team.
It’s not that the Bruins are coming off a two-game win streak for the first time in a month or that they have an entire week between games. It’s not a normal week because UCLA faces USC on Sunday night at 7:30 p.m. at Pauley Pavilion.
Yet, the Bruins’ approach to practice is as normal as ever. As the anticipation of playing their rivals intensifies around Pauley, they hit the court each day focusing on the same thing they have been all season – growing.
“I treat the ‘SC rivalry like what a cool privilege to be a part of one of the coolest rivalries in college sports, but it doesn’t mean any more to me than it does any other game,” said coach Cori Close. “This week is about growing and being a better teammate and learning.”
UCLA (7-9, 3-2 Pac-12) and the USC (11-5, 3-2) are both coming off back-to-back road wins against Utah and Colorado. But the Trojans will need to win a third straight game to prevent the Bruins from winning the season series.
This week, the Bruins have focused on rebounding, being more fundamentally sound and being prepared to meet the Trojans’ physicality with an aggressiveness and mental toughness of their own.
During practice, the team has been working on competitions: scrimmaging at an intense pace and simulating crucial moments in a game. Close pushes her players to fight for loose balls, defend and box out aggressively. The Bruins anticipate a physical, back-and-forth game and Close is making sure her players are ready for that.
“They’re a very physical team, so we just have to stick together through adversity,” said freshman guard Jordin Canada. “They’re gonna go on runs and we’re gonna go on runs, but it’s about who sticks together through that adversity.”
Sticking through adversity is partly reliant on passion – a subjective, abstract component. It is not a statistic, it is not measurable.
Or is it?
Coach Close and her coaching staff have created their own metric to analyze the team’s performance. They are called “passion plays.”
“Passion plays are all the nonstatistical categories,” Close said.
One example of a passion play that Close records is an “assist screen.” The UCLA coach described this play as the passer and the screener as the facilitators and the shooter as the beneficiary. Close aims for 60 passion plays in a game and noted that the team has never lost a media segment when it had at least five passion plays.
“The first media timeout up at Colorado, we had 12 passion plays in the first media segment and we got out on a huge lead. It’s a direct proportion,” Close said.
Close said that they need to focus on stringing passion plays together, which will be important especially in an atmosphere like the one Pauley Pavilion expects to host on Sunday night.
Remembering her previous years on the team, redshirt sophomore guard Kari Korver pictured the stands, getting excited for the chance to play USC. She missed the opportunity last year with a torn ACL.
“This place is more packed than it is for any other game the entire year,” Korver said. “I just love how it’s the fight for L.A.”