Women’s basketball hopes to rebound from losses with focus on 3-pointers

The Bruins will have an opportunity to break a three-game losing streak when it faces the Hoosiers on Sunday.

UCLA women’s basketball (3-4) will host Indiana (6-0) – the 2018 Women’s National Invitation Tournament champions – after returning home winless from the U.S. Virgin Islands Paradise Jam. Indiana will be the third undefeated opponent UCLA has faced this season.

Coach Cori Close said the key to victory Sunday will revolve around the 3-point shot.

“That’s really going to be the key,” Close said. “If we can do a great job chasing them off the 3-point line.”

The Hoosiers have shot a combined 51.1 percent from the field and have shot 21-of-43 from beyond the arc in their last three games.

“It’s going to be key for us to know who the shooters are and where they are,” said sophomore forward Lauryn Miller. “(We need to be) defensively locked in to make sure we don’t let them hit the mark they’ve been hitting.”

Indiana guard Ali Patberg is the Hoosiers’ top scorer and rebounder, averaging 17.8 points and 6.8 rebounds per game. Patberg scored a career-high 30 points on 8-of-11 shooting in the Hoosiers’ victory over the Wake Forest Demon Deacons on Wednesday.

For the Bruins, redshirt freshman guard Lindsey Corsaro has shot 21.4 percent from the field in the last four games.

Corsaro said she is looking forward to the matchup with Patberg, the Notre Dame transfer .

“(Patberg) is really good at getting downhill and to the basket,” Corsaro said. “She’s really aggressive and strong. It’ll be a good battle and be fun to see us go head-to-head with her.”

Defensively, Indiana has allowed its opponents to shoot roughly 23 3-point attempts per game with a 32.1 percent success rate.

“We’ll definitely look to keep exploiting (the 3-point shot),” Miller said. “If there are inside looks, we’ll definitely go to them. But whenever the 3 is open, that’s what we’re going to attack.”

Close said she expects Indiana to give the UCLA more 3-point opportunities.

“Kentucky went out and pressured us, and South Florida backed off and sat in the paint,” Close said. “We struggled a lot more with (USF) sitting in the paint. If I’m predicting, (Indiana is) going to try to make us prove it and make jump shots from the outside.”

The Bruins had 48 points in the paint against the Wildcats – the most in a game this season. Meanwhile, UCLA shot a season-low 2-of-19 from 3 against USF.

Close said she wants the team to moderate its shot selection.

“I don’t want our team to rise and fall by whether or not we make 3s,” Close said. “We don’t want to shoot 20-plus 3s a game. We want to shoot maybe 11 or 12 really good ones.”

The Bruins will enter Sunday shooting a Pac-12-worst 21.8 percent from 3.

Close said she will address the offense’s shooting flaws by gaining more possessions.

“We’re not a great shooting team, so you have to get more possessions,” Close said. “There are two ways you can get more possessions: you can turn people over or you can get more rebounds.”

UCLA averages 19 offensive rebounds per game – good for eighth-best in the country.

“Offensive rebounding – I’m actually very pleased with where we are,” Close said. “If we can get 10 more shots on the goal, I think that’s to our advantage.”

The Bruins will take on the Hoosiers on Sunday at 1 p.m. in Pauley Pavilion.

Men’s basketball to toughen up skills for next match against LMU

Former UCLA guards and first-round draft picks Lonzo Ball and Aaron Holiday were in attendance Wednesday night for the Bruins’ double-digit victory over Hawai’i Rainbow Warriors.

Ball and Holiday were the primary ball-handlers for UCLA in 2016 and 2017, respectively, and they watched their successor – sophomore point guard Jaylen Hands – record a career-high 11 assists against the Hawai’i.

“As a team, we all feed off the point guard,” sophomore guard Kris Wilkes said. “When he’s making moves, making good plays, we just follow right behind him. And it’s just real hard to beat us when everybody’s working together.”

Hands has dished 20 assists in the Bruins’ last two games and is almost halfway to his assist total from last season. His next chance to add to that number will come Sunday night when UCLA (5-2) hosts Loyola Marymount (7-0).

The first half against then-No. 7 North Carolina Tar Heels – in which Hands had eight assists and two turnovers to help the Bruins build a five-point halftime lead – was a breakthrough of sorts for the sophomore.

“I thought I did a really good job getting downhill and making plays,” Hands said Tuesday. “So just making that transition to doing that more and making good decisions once I get to open spots, that’s what I want to be good at.”

But Hands is still making adjustments in his first year as a true point guard expected to run a half-court offense.

Coach Steve Alford said Hands has a tendency to stand 35 feet from the basket after he gives the ball up, and one area he can improve is moving to open areas on the court where he can receive the ball and attack the defense.

Another challenge is running into never-before-seen defensive schemes.

To prevent Hands from going downhill in the pick-and-roll game, the Tar Heels switched screens and their big men sagged into the paint to mitigate any potential driving lanes. They also denied swing passes to the wing, resulting in a heavy amount of dribbling by Hands 30-plus feet from the basket.

“For me, it’s just about seeing how I can attack that better,” Hands said. “Talking to (assistant coach) Tyus (Edney) and coming up with a different game plan, I feel more confident next time that won’t happen.”

Looking at the Lions

Loyola Marymount is off to its best start in school history and was ranked No. 18 on the NCAA’s NET rankings, as of Thursday.

Coach Mike Dunlap’s squad has defeated UNLV on the road and Georgetown at a neutral site.

Guard James Batemon leads the team with 20.3 points per game. Batemon is shooting 46 percent from the floor and has made 88 percent of his free throw attempts – as of Thursday he is in the top-10 nationwide with 60 free throws taken.

But the Lions also rank No. 290 in the NCAA with an average of 15.6 turnovers per game.

Sunday’s tilt may come down to whether UCLA can avoid foul trouble and take advantage in transition against an upstart neighboring school.

“(They’re) high-confidence, (as) an LA-based school,” Alford said. “So they’re going to have a lot of energy coming in here on Sunday.”

UCLA’s inadequate career counseling fails to prepare job-hunting Bruins

UCLA objectively trumps many universities in most regards – but there are some things that we can learn from other schools.

Providing good career services, for example.

UCLA emphasizes providing students with a top-notch education. However, classes generally focus on subject matter mastery, rather than preparing students for their intended career paths. While this greatly helps Bruins who wish to attend graduate school right after completing their undergraduate studies, those who want to pursue a career in industry suffer in the process.

The UCLA Career Center provides a number of services to help students prepare for jobs, internships and graduate school, including one-on-one advising, drop-in sessions and career pop-ups at common student areas. It also provides programs, such as workshops about refining resumes, cover letters and LinkedIn profiles.

However, students often struggle to find internships and jobs, or do not feel confident during recruiting, and the center can do more to help them.

The Career Center must focus on the specific needs of various career paths that students might have, rather than providing only general career-related aid. Specifically, the center needs to help students succeed in interviews, acquire skills that can be transferred to careers and stay up-to-date on recruitment timelines, instead of offering only general career-related help.

Christine Wilson, interim director of the UCLA Career Center, said the job of the center is to help students explore career options and understand what skills they need to be career-ready to get jobs and internships.

But the center does not go beyond providing generic help with career matters. Most jobs and internships require applicants to have knowledge and experience using specific skills and do not even consider those that do not have them. Similarly, classes focus on specific subject matter and do not generally teach students practical skills. As such, students often rely on on-campus student organizations to learn about job opportunities and important skills and to prepare for interviews.

There are a number of skills that students need to learn to be eligible for jobs and internships. Microsoft Office and basic programming skills, for example, are prerequisites for many careers. Without these skills, it is often difficult for students to transition from university life to a full-time career. Bruins do not have an established way to acquire these skills through the center, which used to provide important courses through lynda.com but has now discontinued the service.

“I definitely think more resources on hard skills would be helpful,” said Brian McCormick, a third-year business economics student. “I learned Excel and other skills through student organizations and on the job at my internships, but never really used in tandem with anything (from) UCLA.”

Many students are also on their own when it comes to entering the professional world because the Career Center does not regularly follow up with them about important recruitment deadlines. Various industries, such as investment banking and management consulting, have extensive recruitment cycles on campus, during which companies hire students for internships and full-time jobs. Not all students are aware of these recruitment timelines, though.

“I think the most important aspect that the Career Center could help with would be by making students aware of all the deadlines and the processes that come with it,” said Nawapak Lerthirunvibul, a fourth-year economics student. “I had to rely on business clubs on campus, rather than career services, when recruiting.”

Besides acquiring industry-specific skills, students also need to prepare for interviews, which have varying formats depending on the industry. Students can currently either schedule appointments with a peer advisor or drop in for a short, 15-minute session to do mock interviews. However, certain industry-specific interviews, such as case or technical interviews for management consulting and investment banking opportunities, require extensive practice. Such short sessions are hardly enough for students to thoroughly practice.

Other universities have found better ways. The University of Southern California, for example, provides extensive interview preparation resources, including 24/7 access to online mock-interview modules, interactive case-interview resources and detailed information about numerous industry-specific interviews.

Some may argue the center already does an adequate job of helping students get the information they need. Students in UCLA’s Henry Samueli School of Engineering, for example, can take advantage of numerous career-related opportunities offered by the center such as career fairs and networking events.

However, it is the center’s duty and mission to ensure students in all departments are career-ready. While engineering students can learn most of the programming skills they will need on the job or via classes, North Campus classes tend to be more theoretical and lack definite career paths. The center needs to provide appropriate career services to ensure these students are able to practically apply their knowledge in jobs and internships.

Students deserve to feel confident about entering the real world after graduating from the top public university. To do that, though, UCLA needs to start thinking beyond academic confines.

Only then will Bruins be career ready.

Editorial: Mental health service ‘fast lanes’ won’t solve problems CAPS’ understaffing created

An opaque counseling center is the last thing you would want from a university with a distinct lack of mental health resources.

Turns out, that’s precisely what UCLA has.

The Daily Bruin reported Nov. 16 Counseling and Psychological Services had partnered with the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science to offer additional mental health services to engineering students. Specifically, the school of engineering is providing some funding for a program that allows engineering students to attend twice-weekly drop-in counseling sessions.

Providing engineering students with greater access to care may certainly be appropriate from a policy standpoint. But we can’t forget: CAPS is short-staffed, lacks space and doesn’t have the resources to adequately provide for a student body of over 45,000.

In other words, the center’s partnership with the school of engineering effectively prioritizes requests from engineering students and creates “fast lanes” for access to specialized care.

That’s a policy CAPS hasn’t bothered to tell the student body about.

If CAPS wants to offer specialized mental health services, it has an obligation to divulge which groups of students have access to these resources and why they require them. The same goes for any initiative to contract CAPS’ services by allowing individual academic departments to foot the bill.

Clearly engineering students need greater access to mental health services than is currently available to them. A former UCLA engineering doctoral student killed himself and a professor in a murder-suicide in June 2016. And in October 2016, a 20-year-old student died by suicide after falling from the roof of Boelter Hall.

Nicole Green, CAPS’ executive director, pointed to these very incidents when explaining why the school of engineering sought a partnership with the center. And it’s hard to find fault with engineering students having access to CAPS’ resources in light of the school’s troubled history with mental health.

The problem is with how the university granted this access.

Green told The Bruin in September the solution to UCLA’s dearth of mental health resources wasn’t to create specialized lanes to prioritize access to care for any specific group of students. In fact, she compared the act to adding more lanes on the I-405 highway, a process that only increases traffic woes. Yet Green seems to have flatly contradicted that contention in describing the new mental health services offered specifically for engineering students.

[Podcast: In the Know: UCLA’s Counseling Crisis]

Basic norms of transparency dictate the university should be forthright whenever it decides to implement such a major policy change. In addition, such norms also suggest the university should act transparently if it moves to contract out mental health services on a greater scale.

Even if CAPS’ partnership with the school of engineering is a one-time incident, it’s naive to think other campus entities won’t now seek out ways to have the center cater to their respective students. Such a policy of partnership with other campus departments may very well improve care. But the efficacy of such initiatives cannot be assessed if UCLA keeps its students and their associated campus departments in the dark – especially when those very students are funding CAPS’ operations.

Solving UCLA’s mental health woes requires enacting nontraditional initiatives that offer meaningful services to students.

Those solutions may lack extensive institutional support. But they shouldn’t be lacking in transparency.

Chicano musician to discuss issues of identity and inclusivity in LA at book talk

In 1974, Rubén Guevara found himself climbing the steps of centuries-old Mayan pyramids in Palenque, Mexico. The Los Angeles native did not know then that the trip to connect with his ancestral roots would help him embrace his Chicano identity, which later became a monumental influence on his musical career, he said.

Guevara, a Chicano rock ‘n’ roll artist, wrote of his journey as a musical artist and activist in his memoir, “Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer.” The UCLA alumnus and former visiting professor will return to Jan Popper Theater to discuss his book, which was published April 13. In addition to exploring his identity and inspirations, Guevara said the memoir highlights important issues of social justice in the LA community that have continued throughout his life.

“I realized that to become a Chicano is a choice and I chose to commit to that title,” Guevara said. “Whether it’s through the arts, education or science, the goal in the end is to enhance and contribute to the culture and the legacy of the culture.”

Guevara said he committed to expanding the reach of Chicano culture to enrich the community and gain respect from Mexicans who looked down on him. Because many Mexicans believe Chicanos have no culture of their own, Guevara said he took it upon himself to showcase the culture through his music.

By creating music in the Chicano community, the artist said he has continued taking on issues of racism and social justice, especially as they pertain to the LA area. One of Guevara’s earliest songs addressing Chicano history in LA is “C/S,” which was released in 1983. Guevara said “C/S” stands for “con safos,” which translates to “with safety.” “C/S” is derived from a tag used in graffiti by Chicanos to trademark and protect their street art. The lyrics tell the history of LA and highlight the overlooked role of the Mexicans who aided in the city’s inception. Guevara said the title “C/S” functions to help him reclaim the city as his own.

“I’m still working with marginalized groups and touching on issues that affect us. I try to shed some light in dark places,” Guevara said. “That’s my job.”

Watching his city being torn apart by racism and social discrimination in the wake of the Watts riots of 1965 and Rodney King riots of 1992 inspired him to take up musical activism, Guevara said. Despite being decades apart, both riots were in response to police brutality against African-American individuals. Residents of LA banded together in protest seeking accountability for these actions. As a marginalized individual and native Angeleno, Guevara said the riots resonated with him. He elaborates further on the personal impact the riots had on him in his memoir.

“Growing up in Los Angeles, LA has been my laboratory. I talk about its history, the Mexican presence here and its struggles,” Guevara said. “My book is a testament to that journey.”

George Lipsitz, a professor of black studies at UC Santa Barbara, first approached Guevara to write a memoir 20 years ago. The two met at a conference at UCLA where Lipsitz invited Guevara to talk in one of his classes. He said Guevara’s yearning to be of value to the LA community through his activism and art sets him apart from other artists. The dedication Guevara has to creating meaningful art makes him perfectly suited for writing a memoir, Lipsitz said.

“It has the good, the bad and the ugly of the history of Los Angeles. But in many ways, it’s a love letter to the unfilled potential of the city” Lipsitz said.

Guevara was a substitute professor for a Chicano music class taught by Steven Loza, an ethnomusicology professor at UCLA. Loza said the Chicano music class was perfectly suited for Guevara to teach due to his music career and dedication to Chicano history. Guevara said he included his own music in the curriculum in order to teach students about the history of Chicano music.

Returning to UCLA to talk about “Confessions of a Radical Chicano Doo-Wop Singer” will be a major achievement in his career, he said. He hopes students take away the importance of perseverance, commitment, dedication, integrity and honor.

“My act of survival I see as a radical act in spite of all the ups and downs of my career,” Guevara said. “(The memoir) reminds me to stay on track, so it’s an ongoing realization and commitment to be committed.”