After graduating a decorated class of seniors, the Bruins were picked to finish sixth in the Pac-12 this season.
“That’s when the outside world kind of started talking about, ‘Oh, it’s going to be a rebuilding year for UCLA, they’re going to have a rough year,’” said redshirt senior guard Chrissy Baird.
And after a season-opening loss to Loyola Marymount and a 34-point loss to North Carolina, No. 20 UCLA women’s basketball (20-12, 12-6 Pac-12) was off to its worst start since 2014.
But coach Cori Close said the Bruins weren’t going to let that define the rest of their season.
“(We chose) to stay together and chose a growth mindset even when it was painful,” Close said. “That’s what gave us the incremental steps to get us to the point where we had that tipping point that happened at Arizona State.”
UCLA upset then-No. 16 Arizona State 61-59 with a game-winning 3 from senior guard Japreece Dean on Jan. 25, and went on to finish the regular season winning 10 of its last 12 games.
During that stretch, UCLA shocked Matthew Knight Arena on Feb. 22, upsetting then-No. 2 Oregon. But Close said doubt continued to loom over UCLA because Oregon was without its leading scorer Ruthy Hebard due to injury.
“People said ‘Oh, it wasn’t a big deal,’” Close said, following the Bruins’ loss to the Ducks in the Pac-12 tournament. “(They said we) beat them when they were No. 2 because they didn’t have (Hebard). I think we proved today that we can play at a pretty high level even when they’ve got (Hebard).”
Close said the reason why the overtime loss hurt more than any other loss during the regular season was because of how close the team was and how much they believed in each other.
“What I told them in the locker room is when you love deeply, it hurts more,” Close said. “When you invest deeply, it’s going to really sting when you’re disappointed.”
UCLA women’s basketball entered the season as a heavy underdog in the Pac-12, but the Bruins found their rhythm and are on the verge of yet another NCAA tournament berth. The final bracket will be announced Monday. (Anirudh Keni/Daily Bruin)
Baird was the first to comfort both Dean and senior guard Kennedy Burke when the two buried their faces in their jerseys, after falling short in the semifinals in back-to-back years.
“I’ve never been on a team that’s closer, and I think that’s part of it,” Baird said. “That we love each other so much that when you look at the person to your left or to your right, you don’t want to let them down.”
Burke – who finished the game with a double-double, notching 27 points and 10 rebounds – said that despite falling short, the team has proved to the committee it deserves a spot in the NCAA tournament.
“We can compete with any team in the country,” Burke said. “It just comes from loving each other and just being invested in each other.”
Although Baird has only played a total of 23 minutes in nine games during her final season, her voice and presence during practice continues to provide a spark for the Bruins.
“It’s fun for me when I sit on the bench and watch them play,” Baird said. “The other team is calling a play and I’m like, ‘We ran that on the scout team and they defended it perfectly.’ And it’s like, yeah, you didn’t see me on the court, but what you didn’t get to see was the fact that the five people that weren’t playing all ran that at practice yesterday and that’s why they got the stop.”
UCLA may have started out the season losing five of its first eight games, but Baird said the Bruins have come a long way.
“You look at where we are now and it’s like, ‘Dang,'” Baird said. “Would we have loved to win some more games in November and December? Absolutely. But if losing those games didn’t lead us here, I wouldn’t trade that for anything.”
It has come to my attention that some fans want the next coach of UCLA men’s basketball to be two-time NCAA champion Rick Pitino.
Hell no.
After firing Steve Alford in December, the Bruins have been preparing for one of the most imperative coaching searches in program history. There’s a lot on the line, and a lot of room for improvement – the Bruins lost in the First Four in 2018 and failed to make the tournament altogether in 2019.
People want a big name, and to be honest, so do I. They also want a disciplined, systematic coach. I’m on the same page.
On paper, Pitino seems like a great fit.
He coached blue blood Kentucky for eight seasons and ACC powerhouse Louisville for 16. He won one NCAA title with each program and even manned the sideline for the Boston Celtics in between the two gigs – albeit not so successfully.
Pitino was and still is a yeller. His former players have said he is an aggressive, rigid coach who doesn’t cut anyone any slack – which is just what UCLA should be looking for.
But this is the real world, not a paper one.
Pitino was fired from the Louisville job in 2017 after an FBI investigation uncovered that he had been working with Adidas officials to pay student-athletes hundreds of thousands of dollars to play for his squad. The NCAA stripped Louisville of its 2013 National Championship, and Pitino was forced to flee to Greece – where he won a league title with Panathinaikos B.C. just last month.
Bringing a Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Famer to the sidelines of Pauley Pavilion doesn’t sound like such a bad idea in theory. Butcoupled with UCLA Athletics’ current predicament at hand, in addition to drama surrounding the Ball family, Chinese prisons and David Grace’s surprise firing – it becomes nearly impossible to imagine Pitino strolling into Westwood.
The million-dollar, nationwide recruiting and admission scandal is still a hot topic, and UCLA men’s soccer coach Jorge Salcedo could be fired any second now due to his role in the scheme. Hiring Pitino right now wouldn’t only be a catastrophic PR move, it would be a permanent damnation of the school’s integrity.
Trying to distract people from the scandal with a flashy coaching hire for a revenue sport is shallow, but understandable. If that hire is Pitino, it would be downright insulting.
I have faith that athletic director Dan Guerrero and Golden State Warriors executive Bob Myers won’t hire Pitino. There are a dozen other options out there, and I have confidence that the Bruins can poach someone like Tony Bennett, Eric Musselman or Nate Oats.
Are those names as big as Pitino’s? Absolutely not, but everyone needs to take a deep breath. Pitino should not, could not and would not ever be the next head coach at UCLA.
The Bruins won’t touch Pitino with a 10-foot pole, and the sooner people realize that, the better.
Madison Kocian kicked up into a handstand at the end of practice – something she couldn’t do a year ago.
But it took a long time to get there.
“I feel like everything really did happen for a reason,” said the former Olympian. “To not know if I was going to be able to compete or not, even though I had worked my whole life for (it), was so hard.”
On the final day of the 2016 Olympic trials, Kocian felt her shoulder tear during her uneven bars routine. She struggled to lift her arm the next day.
Kocian had less than a month at home to work through the pain before she boarded a plane for Rio de Janeiro.
In the Olympics, Kocian earned a team gold medal – the second consecutive win in U.S. history – and an individual silver medal on uneven bars, despite increasingly severe shoulder pain due to her torn labrum.
The following fall, she started her first year of college at UCLA.
Although Kocian knew immediately that she had torn her labrum, it wasn’t until she began her year with the Bruins that she finally had her shoulder imaged by medical professionals.
“At that point I was already really excited to compete my freshman season and finally be in college,” Kocian said. “We just tried to manage it as much as we could, nonsurgically.”
Kocian and her coaches decided that she would compete during her freshman season and forgo immediate invasive treatment.
“(I was) riding out the adrenaline,” Kocian said.
During her freshman season, Kocian competed all-around in 12 out of the Bruins’ 14 meets and came in first in six of them. (Niveda Tennety/Daily Bruin)
On Jan. 7, 2017, Kocian made history alongside then-freshman Kyla Ross as the first gold-medal winning Olympic gymnasts to compete at the collegiate level. During her first meet as a collegiate gymnast, Kocian competed in the all-around and won.
Kocian competed all-around in 12 out of the Bruins’ 14 meets in 2017, coming in first in six of them. She posted her first career perfect 10 on bars on Feb. 11.
But the pain from her labrum tear was getting worse.
For Kocian, the gym was a sanctuary that she could go to when she wanted to relax, especially in the wake of her “Final Five” Olympic fame – but the pain took that away.
“I would come in and feel like I couldn’t do anything because I was in so much pain,” Kocian said. “My whole life felt overwhelmed, because I felt like I had no place to go. I was also trying to keep up on school, trying to figure out the social life and trying to figure out how I could manage my time and fit it all in. I didn’t want another thing.”
Kocian’s discomfort intensified with every meet and her coaches began to worry that there was another problem with her shoulder range.
By the 2017 NCAA championships, Kocian said she was in so much pain that she was willing to try anything.
Her doctors prescribed platelet-rich plasma injections. Kocian had her blood drawn and was then injected with a stronger concentration of her own platelets. She was told that it was supposed to accelerate healing in her tendons, ligaments, muscles and joints and she would start to feel the results in four weeks.
But it didn’t work.
With fear that she had more serious bicep damage and with the support of her coaches, Kocian scheduled surgery for August 2017 – the start of her sophomore year.
“She knew what she could work through and she knew what she couldn’t work through,” said coach Valorie Kondos Field. “With any great athlete, it has nothing to do with pain, it has to do with strength, and she had officially lost her strength in that arm, so it was a no-brainer.”
Kocian said she promised her team that she was going to be supportive in 2018, even if it was from the bench.
The then-sophomore decided that she would act as a team manager for as long as she wasn’t medically cleared to compete. This included moving the mats for her teammate’s routines and encouraging them from the sidelines.
“We called her ‘Coach Koc,’” Kondos Field said. “She jumped in to helping her teammates realize how amazing they are. She helped them figure their skills out and was there supporting them in that role.”
Despite a 10- to 12-month estimated recovery time that would take her out of the 2018 season, Kocian said she told her team she planned to be strong enough to compete on three events once she was six months post-surgery.
And she started to recover ahead of schedule.
“We all knew that she was going to do everything that she could to be back as quickly as possible,” Kondos Field said. “That included everything that we didn’t really see. She even changed her diet, which is absolutely remarkable. She did the research to figure out what would help her heal quicker and stronger. That’s taking being an athlete to the highest level.”
Following her surgery, Kocian came back to compete during the Bruins’ championship run last season and posted a 9.9375 on the uneven bars in the Super Six. (Liz Ketcham/Assistant Photo editor)
After sitting out of the Bruins’ first two meets of the 2018 season, Kocian competed on balance beam Jan. 20. By late February, she was competing on floor exercise.
On April 7, Kocian made her 2018 uneven bars debut at the NCAA Regional Championships – just over seven months after her surgery. She scored a 9.875, which tied for the fourth-highest score of the meet on bars.
“I was getting ahead of my rehab timeline,” Kocian said. “(Kondos Field) told me, ‘You don’t know when the last day of your gymnastics will be, so just live in the moment, take every day as you can and don’t take anything for granted.’ That was when I decided that I was going to compete, even if it was just for the last few meets.”
Kocian competed on beam, floor and bars in the entirety of the Bruins’ championship run, posting a 9.9375 on bars in the Super Six.
Kocian has been removed from the floor lineup during the 2019 season, but has competed on balance beam in nine out of 11 of the Bruins’ meets and on uneven bars in every meet this season.
Three meets into the season, Kocian posted her second career perfect 10 on uneven bars. She has averaged a 9.900 on uneven bars in 2019 and she is one of only three Bruins with a perfect score this season.
“This year I’ve focused on living in the moment and trying to be my best self and I think it has made all the difference,” Kocian said. “I’m a lot closer with my teammates and we’re laughing a lot more in the gym. I think that’s brought a different mindset when I go in to compete and I don’t put so much pressure on myself to be perfect.”
Kocian has only competed on the uneven bars and balance beam in the 2019 season – notching a perfect 10 on bars against Arizona State on Jan. 21. (Liz Ketcham/Assistant Photo editor)
Aside from competition success, Kocian said she is dedicating the 2019 season to developing stronger relationships. She is sharing her first apartment this year with fellow juniors Ross, Felicia Hano and Mercedez Sanchez.
“She is breaking out of her shell more than ever before and she’s been a great role model,” Ross said. “She puts passion into everything she does – whether that’s school, gymnastics or just helping a friend. I’ve been able to see a different side of her this year, and it’s been really cool to be close to her through it all.”
In more ways than one, Kocian said she is the strongest she has been since she began her college career – and just in time for the 2019 postseason.
After defeating Utah State in their final home meet last weekend, Kocian and the rest of the Bruins will begin their postseason push for an opportunity for a repeat NCAA title at the Pac-12 championship March 23.
“I don’t regret anything that I’ve done in gymnastics and I definitely don’t regret any of my injuries,” Kocian said. “They’ve all helped me in one way or another – whether it taught me work ethic, perseverance or resilience – and those are more of what define me than anything else that I’ve gone through.”
The Bruins swept the Huskies to start off Pac-12 play.
No. 1 UCLA softball (25-1, 3-0) got the win in all three games it played against No. 5 Washington (22-6, 0-3) in the first weekend of the conference schedule. The Bruins won 3-0 on Friday, 4-2 on Saturday and 15-6 on Sunday.
“We had some great success in preseason, so we wiped the slate clean coming into Pac-12s,” said coach Kelly Inouye-Perez. “This was a great test for us, to be on the road against a team like Washington and play the way that we did.”
The Bruins were held hitless until the sixth inning Friday night. But then the offense broke through, starting with a leadoff single by freshman utility Kelli Godin, who advanced to second on her team-leading 12th stolen base.
Sophomore shortstop Briana Perez followed that up with an infield single, and an intentional walk loaded the bases for senior utility Taylor Pack, who laced a double to center to score all three runners.
That would be all UCLA needed for the win, as redshirt junior pitcher Rachel Garcia held Washington to just three hits in the 3-0 complete-game shutout – her fourth of the season.
“I just was really focusing on the game plan, and I thought we executed very well,” Garcia said. “Luckily, I had my teammates too, who also had my back behind me and offensively.”
Garcia was also a key player in game two of the series, entering in relief and pitching five more innings of shutout ball after starter sophomore Holly Azevedo gave up two runs early in the game.
With help from a two-RBI single by junior outfielder Bubba Nickles in the third, Garcia would get out of jams in both the fifth and seventh innings to send the game into extras at 2-2.
It was at this point that Garcia smashed a game-winning two-run home run to left-center, bringing in redshirt sophomore utility Aaliyah Jordan, who had just picked up a double. A 1-2-3 bottom of the eighth secured the 4-2 victory for UCLA, as Garcia finished with seven strikeouts.
“Washington is just a very solid team; we knew that coming up here and playing in their house was going to be competitive,” Inouye-Perez said. “The first two games were a pitching duel and it just came down to timely hitting.”
Unlike the first two games, Sunday’s matchup saw much more offensive production from both teams, as the Bruins scored 15 runs on 15 hits from seven different players.
UCLA took the lead in the first inning with an RBI single from Garcia, and three batters later, a grand slam from senior infielder Brianna Tautalafua made it 5-0.
The Bruins scored four more runs in the second on back-to-back two-RBI doubles from Garcia and Pack, followed by five runs in the third. This was capped off by a three-run home run from Garcia to make it 14-4 by the end of the third. UCLA would score one more time in the fourth and – despite a home run from Washington in the fifth – the Bruins completed the sweep with a 15-6 mercy-rule victory.
Freshman Megan Faraimo got the win in the circle for UCLA, giving up three earned runs in four innings and surrendering only three hits.
Garcia went 4-for-4 in the game with a double and home run, just a triple shy of the cycle. Tautalafua and Godin each contributed three hits to the effort as well.
“The difference was that we attacked early in the count, and early in the game,” Tautalafua said.
UCLA will have a break from Pac-12 play next weekend, and will instead face Saint Mary’s and CSUN on the road.
For one of the most bustling university locations with a student body of more than 44,000 students, you would expect to see fast-paced development to meet the ever-growing demand for student housing.
But Westwood’s housing market is stuck in the 20th century.
The consequences of this slow development affect every student here: Westwood has one of the highest rents in Los Angeles, students are going further into debt to get their degrees and landlords can keep upping the prices for tiny units.
All the units on the campus’ west side, where many undergraduates live, are ancient. Most were built before California’s housing crisis, when low-rise buildings and town houses were enough to meet demand. Limited developable space, resistance from neighbors and a lengthy and expensive approval process are to blame for Westwood’s slow-to-nonexistent housing development.
Now that the North Village is all built out, landlords can charge absurdly high rents, averaging more than $4,000 per month for two-bedroom apartments. The only solution is to expand the housing supply, so students have more power in deciding where to live and landlords are pressured to make rents fairer.
One project could catalyze that development: The Agora on Hilgard Avenue.
The Agora is a high-rise apartment building proposed by two developers who are also physicians. It’s meant to be housing for students, with study rooms and lots of common space intended to create a community for residents. But the project has faced steep opposition, from resident complaints about destroying views to claims that it’s not affordable.
Residents are grasping at straws to defend their own interests.
Aaron Green, the project representative, said the 16-story high-rise building offers a much-needed 462 beds, 52 of which will be classified as affordable and cost less than $500 per month.
“The remaining units will rent for between $1,000 to $1,200,” Green added.
That kind of rent is on par with many apartments in the Village and is comparable to the price of living on the Hill. Moreover, the fact that the project is adding 52 affordable units to Westwood is huge for an area that’s barely been developed in the last 20 years, especially since almost all recent development has been luxury apartments.
It makes sense for developers to build luxury apartments, since it’s hard to turn a profit with such limited space to develop, and also because high-end projects face less resistance from planners and neighbors.
But all of these luxury units are not able to meet the amount of demand for housing nor the price range that students can afford.
The Agora stands to reverse that trend. Even if its units are not inherently affordable, it addresses a key issue in Westwood: There just isn’t enough housing. Students who want to live in luxury units, students looking for cheaper apartments and graduate students all compete for the same apartments, allowing landlords to charge increasingly high rents for tiny spaces.
“The Agora is a first step toward dealing with Westwood’s student housing crisis,” Green said. “Experts, including UCLA professors, all agree: You have to increase supply to deal with high demand if you want to lower rents.”
The Agora is providing market-rate housing in an area desperately in need of housing. But because it’s a high-rise that brings more students into a quaint neighborhood at the edge of the Village, residents have fought tooth and nail to prevent its approval. From arguments about destroying neighborhood character to ruining skyline views to claims that the project is not affordable and thus against student interests, residents have thrown many contradictory arguments at the wall to see what sticks.
They’ve even made a website combining contradictory comments about affordability and zoning regulations. They go as far as claiming they’re for affordable housing, but only when it is “compatible” with the neighborhood behind it – quite the oxymoron.
This backlash is typical of every student housing project, though. The last major housing project here was completed in 2006.
“Because every large student project always gets large community opposition, developers have been afraid of coming into Westwood,” said Michael Skiles, president of the North Westwood Neighborhood Council and the Graduate Students Association.
The Agora is crucial for precedent. If it is approved, it would signal to developers throughout Los Angeles that Westwood is a great place to build student housing,and that it is profitable. Not approving the project would continue to show developers that neighborhood forces here are too strong and are not worth fighting.
It’s understandable residents are concerned about how the project will change their neighborhood’s character and the potential it has for lowering property values as a consequence of being near dense housing. But these homeowners have benefited highly from the housing crisis, with their home values rising well above millions of dollars, which is nothing near what most of them paid when they first came here.
It’s classic NIMBY-ism: They got their housing while they could, and now they want to exclude students from the market, who, if they lived near these million-dollar homes, could contribute to a marginal decrease in their values.
The Agora would just set back that equilibrium to a more reasonable level – one in which students aren’t priced out of the neighborhood they call home.
Administrators last week, however, showed us a startling truth: Nearly every level of UCLA’s mental health system is broken.
Worse, UCLA is willing to discount that reality.
Despite the bevy of problems with CAPS and growing student discontentment with the service, administrators have few satisfactory solutions and seem to lack an understanding of what students want or need from the services.
In the editorial board’s March 11 meeting with administrators and Chancellor Gene Block, for example, Monroe Gorden Jr., vice chancellor of student affairs, denied that CAPS is a short-term care provider and pointed to how it refers students to off-campus resources.
That answer contradicts the messaging of Nicole Green, the executive director of CAPS, who has stressed that CAPS is a short-term mental health facility built to temporarily serve students on a limited budget. Gorden’s statement also disregards that many students do not have the time or resources to travel off campus and that even if students could, they would have to re-establish meaningful connections with therapists.
Moreover, CAPS’ revolving door of mental health professionals also makes it so students are directed to on-campus mental health groups run by other students – hardly a substitute for one-on-one appointments with a professional. When pressed about this crippling retention dilemma, administrators could do little except acknowledge the problem existed.
The only option UCLA seems to have on the table is a lofty, long-term proposal to combine facilities like John Wooden Center and CAPS to offer a comprehensive wellness center. While promising, the idea is still being drafted and does not stand to alleviate the university’s debilitating mental health staff turnover.
And that’s the point: For the longest time, the story has been that CAPS has struggled because of administrative disinvestment. The truth is UCLA doesn’t even know how to invest in CAPS.
To students, CAPS’ problems are endemic; to CAPS staff, the problems are unsolvable without administrative support; and to administrators, the problems are sometimes even nonexistent.
It’s no wonder the board’s meeting with the chancellor and his vice chancellors was characterized by eyebrow-raising answers: that students who emailed vice chancellors with their concerns would have them addressed, that CAPS doesn’t have hard limits on the number of allotted appointments and that appointment wait times could be only about two weeks.
Murphy Hall is quite a ways from the campus proper. But it shouldn’t be that far from reality.
Of course, serving a community of UCLA’s size is no small feat, and Block has rightly noted that mental health in the nation needs better solutions beyond one-on-one therapy. Research in UCLA’s Depression Grand Challenge and elsewhere regarding things like online- and artificial intelligence-based treatments could very well shape the trajectory of mental health in this country.
But that’s all akin to science fiction right now – this campus needs immediate solutions. And when students look to CAPS, and CAPS to administrators, we’re only left with vague promises and a lot of misunderstandings.
Providing accessible, on-campus mental health care is expectedly a tall order. At UCLA, though, it’s a pipe dream – one students can’t help but fervently hold onto.
According to Gaspar Noé, death is sometimes the best thing that can happen to a person.
The Argentine-French filmmaker’s latest film, “Climax,” first premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival and was released in the United States on March 1. Noé said his late mother altered his perception of death, affecting his portrayal of the event on screen. As a result, “Climax” doesn’t shy away from shocking deaths. Following a dance troupe’s harrowing night after drinking sangria laced with LSD,“Climax” is a chaotic fever dream complete with spirited dance sequences and sudden culminations of violence.
Noé spoke to the Daily Bruin’s Alyssa Wheelerabout “Climax,” death and what he loves about filmmaking.
Daily Bruin: Many of your films put the audience in the mind of the character, but “Climax” is shot from a very objective point of view by depicting events exactly as they are happening rather than from the perspective of the hallucinating characters. Why did you choose to shoot the film in this way?
Gaspar Noé: I didn’t want to repeat the same movies. There’s some similarities between (“Climax”) and “Irreversible,” but I didn’t want to redo “Irreversible.” (“Climax”) is a lot of white noise to show the state of psychosis, but from the outside, as if it was a documentary.
DB: One particularly shocking scene in “Climax” involves a pregnant woman being kicked in the stomach. How do you expect audiences to react to such images?
GN: I knew that those kinds of situations would always make people jump in the audience, but against my will.Besides that there are some very dramatic scenes, the movie is much funnier than all my previous ones. Some people are laughing during all of the second half of the movie, and some other people are watching it like they are being tortured.
But I had the same feeling when I went to see Lars von Trier’s (“The House That Jack Built”) at the Cannes festival. I couldn’t stop laughing because of all of that graphic violence on screen. For me, it was a black comedy. I don’t know how people still think that graphic violence on screen is real violence. It’s just like an imitation of life. And if you go to see a movie, and you know what the subject is, if you’re afraid of the images, just don’t watch it.
DB: Why do you depict death in such tragic and violent ways?
GN: Some deaths are accidents. Most deaths come because of age and illness. But when you write a movie, or when you go to watch a movie, you have to consider them like dreams and nightmares. The viewers want to see their desires on screen, and they want to see their fears on screen, and the director or the writer is projecting his own fears and desires on a piece of paper (that turns) into a film on screen.
I was more focused in showing dramatic deaths like sudden deaths, car crashes, etc. But since my mother died six years ago, I have a far more positive perception of death because she was in such bad health, physically and mentally. Sometimes death is the best thing that can happen to a person. Birth is not alway a positive thing and death, for sure, is not a negative thing, especially when your body and brain are begging to die.
DB: What is your favorite part of the filmmaking process?
GN: I don’t like producing that much because it brings a lot of stress dealing with money that you have to pay or that you have to borrow. In the case of (“Climax”), I’m just the silent co-producer. My favorite part is shooting and editing the movies. I barely write scripts anymore. I think of a concept, I think of an idea, but my favorite parts are on the set shooting.
DB: Has there been a moment when you feel you perfectly executed your artistic vision on screen?
GN: “Climax” ended up being much better than what I expected. I didn’t have low expectations, but I thought I would do a movie that would turn out far darker than the final result. Once you have the people you want to film, the set and your favorite team, they all come with ideas, and it’s a collective joy that spreads. Most of the best ideas come at the last moment on the set. I really had a lot of fun shooting this movie, and there was no tension at all between anybody.
