I knew we were going to make it.
Other people may have been surprised, but I wasn’t. My teammates weren’t, either. From the moment we exited the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament in the round of 16 in 2024, we knew that the 2024–25 season would be different. We would do what no other UCLA women’s team had done since the dawn of the 64-team women’s tournament in 1982 — we would make the Final Four.
To get there, we knew what we needed to do, what we needed to improve upon — just taking care of the ball a bit better, addressing special situations — and Coach Close rolled strategies to tackle those into our daily practices, which helped us focus in crunch times. It also helped that we were a really tight-knit unit — not just teammates, but friends. We stayed loose. You should have seen us in the locker room during the tournament — there was a lot of dancing.
Looking back, we had a retreat the previous summer that was key — though, ironically, I was in Mexico, so I wasn’t there for it. But the afterglow of that retreat wafted around us all season. We had a solid group of returners, a core group of leaders. Everyone just kept their heads down and stayed focused. We became the top-ranked team in the country, which was awesome. But we knew that was not the ultimate goal. Winning a championship was.
Beating a stellar team like LSU in the Elite Eight to make it to the Final Four in Tampa was huge. I mean, just incredible. No one on our staff had ever been to the Final Four. And there is just so much noise with all of that — our families, media, fans, cameras, hype, excitement, adrenaline. I look back at my Instagram account now and I’m like, Wow. That was a lot. And so much fun.
Obviously, that final game against UConn did not go the way we wanted it to, which was difficult. I bolted into the locker room and cried. The sadness lasted for a while, which I think is to be expected when you work that hard for that long and you don’t make it all the way there. But the whole experience — all of that Bruin love, support and pride, and the way our team and our coaches became one big “Close” family, literally! — no one can take that away from us. We did something no other UCLA women’s hoops team had done.
And perhaps that’s the biggest beauty about sports: There’s always next year. We’ll see you at Pauley.
Read more from UCLA Magazine’s Winter 2026 issue.
