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The UCLA Bruins NCAA women’s basketball team is the No. 1 team in the country, as they have amassed a perfect 15-0 record. 

Among these wins is a dominant 77-62 victory over the South Carolina Gamecocks, who were the 2024 NCAA Champions and had won 43 consecutive games before the Bruins defeated them at home. 

UCLA has reached this point by cultivating a culture of mental toughness in basketball, which is crucial for any team’s sustained success. 

UCLA’s head coach Cori Close has turned her team into a National Championship contender by turning mental fortitude into a weapon on the court. And her ‘Cori Close - Coaching The Mental Game of Basketball’ conveys the key tactics she uses when instilling mental toughness within her team. 

We’ve pulled two of the most vital lessons of her clinic and included them below for you to bring to your team. 

Refocusing vs Focusing

Refocusing vs Focusing

Coach Close stresses that coaches must emphasize to their players that basketball is a game that’s rooted in failure. 

In order to achieve this, Coach Close emphasizes “refocusing, not focusing”. She notes that while of course coaches want their players to be focused throughout a game, she can’t even go an entire staff meeting remaining focused — so why should she expect her players to do something even she can’t do?

But players can increase the quickness of how and when they refocus. The way UCLA and Coach Close accomplish this is by helping every player develop what she calls a “refocus routine”. 

This is a set of simple actions that a player can utilize and turn into a habit when they’re told or recognize that it’s time to refocus on (and off) the court. This can be anything that can be accomplished in a few seconds and essentially serve as a reset button. 

Another tool that UCLA and Coach Close use is “E + R = O”. This means Event + Response = Outcome. 

Events (both positive and negative) happen; especially in basketball, where every possession in a game comes with success or failure. 

“We want to strengthen their R to be greater than every E they’re going to face,” Coach Close said. 

Resetting Players' View of Adversity

Resetting Players' View of Adversity

Coach Close explains that coaches must, “Layer experiences to control [a player’s] preparation and opportunities.” And in doing so, this will allow a coach to help a player, “reframe how they see adversity, and hard things. And it creates freedom.” 

Coach Close then relayed a story of a former WNBA player who was on the Los Angeles Sparks when they won the 2016 WNBA Championship. This player was able to surrender to the game’s result of those WNBA Finals because she knew she did everything she could to become a good teammate, and could therefore still play with freedom, regardless of whether the game had gone her way. 

This, in Coach Close’s opinion, makes for an extremely mentally strong athlete and is something that she is looking to instill within her players. 

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