UCLA women’s basketball draws No. 3 seed in NCAA Tournament, faces Wyoming
Every day, the UCLA women’s basketball players and coaches choose a mindset.
“You have the opportunity to choose discipline or default, sort of the day happens to you and you hope it goes well,” Coach Cori Close said. “We’re not willing to settle for that, we want to set our minds on the direction.”
It’s part of the team’s theme of “perspective” this year, and the Bruins began their NCAA Tournament journey with intention, as the NCAA Tournament selection show on Monday revealed that UCLA (16-5) enters the first round of the 64-team event as a No. 3 seed and will play No. 14 seed Wyoming (14-9) on Monday, March 22 at 7 p.m. PT in San Antonio.
“There are so many distractions that can be coming,” Close said. “We’re in final exams right now. We’re going into the pseudo-bubble. We have all these different things, and if you don’t set your mind with the perspective that you want to choose, you will have a hard time.”
UCLA earned an at-large bid after finishing as runner-up in the Pac-12 Conference Tournament, beating Washington and Arizona before losing to top-seeded Stanford, 75-55, in the championship game earlier this month in Las Vegas.
Wyoming is the Mountain West Conference Tournament champion, having defeated Utah State, UNLV, Boise State and Fresno State on four consecutive days en route to the title as the seventh seed. Wyoming makes its second NCAA Tournament appearance on a six-game winning streak.
After a year of student-athletes playing basketball and living life inside a COVID-19 pandemic-induced bubble, the NCAA Tournament has survived. About a year after the 2020 tournament cancellation, UCLA is headed to San Antonio.
“We had talked about how we just like, want to really hold on to every single moment of this process,” said Natalie Chou, a guard from Plano, Texas, just outside of Dallas. “Last year it was, we had come back from Pac-12’s, we had a great practice and then, boom, we had heard that our whole tournament season had been canceled, just like taken away.”
The tournament will be held on six courts at five venues in the San Antonio region, with the Alamodome as the host for the Final Four.
The regions this year are named after locations in Texas, such as Hemisfair – UCLA’s designated region – and while the team will be together when they head to Texas, the Bruins were separated physically on the day of the Selection Show, since it coincided with final exams.
“I even gave them the option and they were like, we have too much,” Close said. “Some of them had exams, some of them had papers to do, some of them were at tutoring sessions. And so we were not able to watch it together. It was one of my favorite things and I felt so lonely.”
Should UCLA win its first-round game, it will face either No. 6 seed Texas or No. 11 Bradley. The Bruins, who came in at No. 8 in the latest NCAA women’s basketball NET rankings, have lofty goals for this event.
There will be discipline, there will be dancing, but there certainly will be no defaulting.
UCLA (16-5) vs. Wyoming (14-9)
When: Monday, March 22, 7 p.m.
Where: Frank Erwin Center, San Antonio
TV: ESPN