Cori Close's Wooden Connection

UCLA women's basketball head coach Cori Close opens up about what a national title would mean, and the answer goes back to John Wooden.

November of her first year at UCLA, Steve Lavin, then the restricted earnings coach on the men's side, told her she was coming with him to see Coach Wooden that night. She was a nervous wreck. Walked into his apartment in Encino behind a group of men's coaches and hung back. Wooden asked who she was. She said Cori Close. He asked how she spelled Cori. C-O-R-I.

Wooden walked her into his den and showed her a little bench right outside. It said C-O-R-I. He told her she was the first person he had ever met who spelled it the way his great-granddaughter Cori did. From that moment, Close went back every other Tuesday for almost 15 years.

The Pyramid of Success still lives in her program. Forbes called it the most widely used business motivational tool a few years ago, but for Close the value was never about tactics. It was about character. Doing the right thing in your process and letting the outcomes take care of themselves. Her journal entry two days earlier was a prayer: help me define success the way Coach Wooden taught me.

On what a title would mean to her players, Close reframes the question entirely. Wooden's greatest gift to her was showing that when you have that level of success, it validates the process. You can hold the highest standards, treat people well, and still win at the top.

For her team, it would mean something specific. The trophy case in the Hall of Fame holds 124 national championships for UCLA. None of them are women's basketball. When she first got the job, she took a picture of the empty space and put it next to her desk. The phrase she hung on it: uncommon women willing to make uncommon choices yielding an uncommon result. That result is filling that space.

She adds a correction for the record. UCLA women won a national title in 1978, but it was AIAW, before the NCAA acknowledged women's basketball. The empty space exists because of a technicality, not because of effort.