Only a few days removed from a near monumental win over No. 2 Stanford, the UCLA women’s basketball team has shifted gears and now sets their sights on another tough Pac-10 opponent.
The Bruins will pay a visit to the crosstown-rival Trojans Sunday in a game that will pit against each other two teams coming off of their first Pac-10 losses on the season over this past weekend.
And even though the Bruins are looking ahead, they aren’t quite ready to forget about that Stanford game completely. UCLA coach Nikki Caldwell is hoping that Sunday’s game proved to be a valuable lesson to her young squad.
“It’s not a matter of getting it out of their minds, it’s more so learning from it,” Caldwell said after Wednesday’s practice. “Hopefully they all take from that game and realize that they’re capable of playing with some of the best teams in the country and just need to put it together for 40 minutes.”
Caldwell is certainly justified in believing her team has the ability to compete with some of the top teams in the nation, seeing as how they led No. 4 Tennessee at halftime of their early season matchup before losing that game, and they came back from a 16-point halftime deficit against Stanford before losing by four.
In addition, Caldwell has more than made sure that her team was road-tested prior to the Pac-10 season, traveling to Tennessee to face the Lady Vols, as well as taking on Big 12 power Kansas in the Jayhawks’ backyard.
And although Stanford is the only team to defeat both the Bruins and Trojans in Pac-10 play, the Cardinal handily defeated USC, blasting the Trojans by 20. But Caldwell is adamant the margin of victory for Stanford, 20 over USC and four over UCLA, has nothing to do with determining the outcome of this weekend’s UCLA-USC clash.
“It doesn’t mean anything, just Stanford beat ‘SC and then Stanford beat UCLA,” Caldwell said. “At the end of the day, it’s about the number of wins versus the number of losses. You can’t necessarily worry about the score of another game.”
Instead, Caldwell has worried herself with more pressing issues arising from that Stanford game, specifically her team’s lack of execution on both sides of the ball.
“We broke down defensively time and time again,” Caldwell said. “The other area that we struggled with was that offensively we did not … execute in the manner that we’ve been accustomed to practicing. We weren’t translating that urgency that we have in practice to the game.”
Sophomore guard Jasmine Dixon seconded the notions of her coach, claiming that no matter the score in either game, neither the Bruins or Trojans were victorious.
“USC has beaten everybody we’ve beaten and they lost to the same team we lost to,” Dixon said. “We’re not better than them because we only lost to Stanford by four. A loss is a loss.”
But according to Dixon, she and her teammates aren’t harping on the missed opportunity to take down Stanford, and are instead preparing for the task that lay ahead.
“It’s in the past now. We just got to get ready for USC. Just because we had a loss doesn’t mean that we’re losers.”