Tuesday afternoon’s women’s basketball practice at Pauley Pavilion looked slightly different than normal. Customarily, coach Nikki Caldwell runs a scrimmage between the scout team and her players near the end of practice. While her players run offensive sets, the scout team runs the upcoming opponent’s offense.
Yet this time around, once the scout team would convert a bucket, the women’s basketball players would sprint down to the other end and reset on defense. Caldwell’s players ran no offensive possessions in the practice scrimmage. The message for this week was clear: Defense is the priority.
This weekend, UCLA (14-4, 5-2 Pac-10) travels to the Bay Area to face off with two of the best teams in the country. The Bruins will face No. 7 California (16-2, 7-0) tonight in Berkeley and No. 9 Stanford (15-4, 6-1) on Sunday in Palo Alto. In order to pull off a stunning road upset of the Pac-10’s elite, Caldwell knows that UCLA’s defense will have to be top-notch.
“We have to get used to playing consecutive defensive possessions,” Caldwell said. “There have been times when we haven’t played to our potential on that end.”
The Golden Bears enter the game against UCLA on an eight-game winning streak, including a huge home victory over rival Stanford to take sole possession of first place in an increasingly competitive conference. UCLA travels to the Bay Area with a win streak of their own, sweeping the Washington schools in Los Angeles last week to notch their third straight win. In their last three contests ““ wins over conference bottom-feeders Arizona, Washington State and Washington ““ the Bruins’ defense has clamped down. It is a trend Caldwell and her players are looking to continue against a high-powered Cal offense.
“We know that they have really good bigs,” sophomore guard Darxia Morris said. “We have to play good defense as a team to shut them down.”
One of those bigs is standout forward Ashley Walker, who leads the conference in scoring at 20.7 points per game. The other is center Devanei Hampton, a two-time All-American and a finalist for the Wooden Award last season. Since Hampton returned to the starting lineup, the Bears are an unblemished 8-0.
“They have some outstanding post players,” Caldwell said. “We know that they are the focus of their offense, so we need to find ways to shut them down.”
Hampton and Walker will present a challenge to UCLA’s interior players, like Moniquee Alexander and Chinyere Ibekwe. Much of the practice scrimmage was spent testing UCLA’s defense in the paint.
However, the Bruins will need to be cautious about putting too much focus near the rim. The Bears spread the floor as well as any team with a pair of deadly three-point shooters. All-conference standout Alexis Gray-Lawson, who played 44 minutes in Cal’s overtime win at UCLA last season, is a threat handling the basketball and shooting from the outside. Fellow guard Natasha Vital leads the conference from behind the arc, shooting 47.3 percent.
With this in mind, UCLA’s guards know that they will have a big assignment.
“I know that everyone is going to have to bring their A-game,” Morris said. “Everyone is going to have to play together and step up their game. Cal is a really good team.”
In addition to combating the outstanding individual players, UCLA will have to deal with a hostile road environment. The Bruins have struggled on the road up to this point in the season, and Haas Pavilion will be no different. Morris insists, however, that her teammates will become comfortable with the road conditions, adding that coach Caldwell has stressed the importance of maintaining normalcy away from home.
“She always tells us that everything is the same,” Morris said. “The lines are the same distance, the court is the same, the rules are the same. It’s just that there are more of the other team’s fans.”
If everything goes as planned for Morris and her team, the Bruins will attempt to silence those onlookers tonight.