Welcome to your first Big Ten road trip to the Midwest, UCLA women’s basketball. There was word of a winter storm, did you pack some of those big parkas the school keeps around for the road, along with that 14-0 record and No. 1 ranking?
You lost about 40 degrees in your flight here, so are you familiar with the concept of wind chill factor?
And oh, by the way, isn’t your team bus going in the wrong direction?
Conference life on the road will be very different for the new coast-to-coast Big Ten, with its different styles, different time zones and different weather forecasts. To get a feel for the future, let’s check in on how the first long-distance two-game league swing went for the top-ranked women’s basketball team in the land.
Bloomington,11 a.m., Saturday.
The tipoff with Indiana is an hour away and the Simon Skjodt Assembly Hall seats are starting to fill, but where are the Bruins? The team had flown in the previous evening and its hotel was maybe five minutes away, but so far, no UCLA.
Here they come finally. Seems like the bus driver had the idea that the team was going to Indianapolis, an hour north. The traveling party was headed that way for maybe 15 miles, very close to where the Bruins men’s coaching legend John Wooden played his high school ball, before someone noticed the error and a U-turn was hurriedly made.
“Six minutes ended up being about 45 minutes,” coach Cori Close would later say.
Oh, well. UCLA likes to say they stay in neutral, no matter what the problem. They're ready for the noon game, which is at 9 a.m. back home. And if you think that’s early, they did a walkthrough at the hotel at 7:45 a.m. local time, which is 4:45 in Los Angeles. Talk about a far-flung Big Ten, when the ball goes up, the Bruins are 2,000 miles from home and it’s barely past breakfast time.
“The noon tip isn’t tough because we practice at 9 a.m. every single day,” Close said. “But you have to get up so much earlier for your pregame meal and for all the other things. I think we’re going to have to evaluate that every single trip and just try to see how did our team respond and find that rhythm. I think it’s going to be an adventure.”
UCLA received a jumbo scoop of Big Ten hostility with a crowd of 11,528 pouring into Assembly Hall, in a noisy anti-UCLA frame of mind. The Bruins won 73-62, holding Indiana scoreless for eight minutes in the first half, but it wasn't that easy as the Hoosiers fought to stay within range.
“It definitely was a physical day, but I think we figured out how to work around that,” said Bruins star center Lauren Betts, who went for 25 points and 12 rebounds. Guard Kiki Rice struggled shooting at 3 for 13, but enjoyed the first exposure to Big Ten Midwestern fervor. “This was definitely one of the places that I was very excited to come to and play at. Assembly Hall, obviously a super historical basketball arena,” she said. “When we came out for warmups and when the game started it was just like an electric environment. Sometimes it’s fun to play on the road and play in front of a ton of fans who aren’t rooting for you.”
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Not that these Bruins are strangers to travel. The season opener was against Louisville in Paris and they piled up three wins at the Rainbow Wahine Showdown in Hawaii. But those weren’t conference games, and they weren’t true road tests in buildings loudly against them. To thrive in the Big Ten, it will take hardened road warriors — through winter storm warnings, early starts, wrong turns by the bus driver, all of it.
“I’ve really been challenging them recently to be willing to win ugly, to be able to win in a gritty way and not a pretty way,” Close said. Before the team left the arena, she stood in an Assembly Hall corridor and described what this altered world was like.
“I think the reality is we are in a new landscape of college athletics, period. So to me it’s about being willing to adjust. My job as a leader is, 'What does this require of us now?' ” she said. “You’re not going to hear me complain about one thing. I’m thrilled to be in the Big Ten. We have an academic learning specialist that travels with us everywhere we go, we have a dietician just for our team to monitor sleep and nutrition. We chartered a huge plane here. Our administration has really stepped up and tried to give us every opportunity to be competitively excellent and academically excellent at the same time.
“It’s the best conference in women’s basketball. I want to be a part of it.”
But how do the visitors from Southern California feel about the winter storm warning just issued by the National Weather Service? They don’t see many of those in Westwood.
“That‘s a reality and when we chose to join the Big Ten that was something we knew we were walking into,” Close said. “Our kids got some new winter gear.”
The UCLA athletic department has a stash of new heavy parkas for its teams and the players picked them up off the rack as they left and returned them when they get back. Add that to the list of changes UCLA made in joining the Big Ten. More parkas!
Tuesday, 7 p.m., West Lafayette.
Location can mean everything in Midwestern winters. The storm has been only a dusting in West Lafayette and snow barely covers the ground. Back in Bloomington, 120 miles south, they had nearly nine inches of that stuff. Good thing for UCLA, this journey went from Indiana to Purdue rather than the other way around.
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It was a quiet three days since leaving Bloomington. The team stopped in Indianapolis Saturday night to catch the Indiana Pacers game, then bused to its hotel at the Purdue Student Union. Nothing much going on there. Few places are deader than a college campus during a holiday break.
Sunday was a rest day and Monday was for practice, films, etc. Big Ten teams must get accustomed to downtime on the road since nearly all trips east or west involve two games with two or three days in between. Also, there had to be time to visit the John Wooden statue and John R. Wooden Drive. Before he was a coaching icon with 10 national championships at UCLA, he was a player for Purdue. Close was determined her players saw those as she became a good friend and student of Wooden in his final years, soaking up every bit of grandfatherly wizardry he would give her. She’d even bring him ice cream. Now, some of those lessons are reflected in her unbeaten team. “It always means something to me to remember how lucky I am to have been mentored by him,” she said. “What a joy to honor him and to tell his stories and to talk of his memories.
“Their entire family has been really good to me and to UCLA and I think that’s the last we can do for him, to honor where he went to school and the impact he made and maybe learn a couple of facts I didn’t even know.”
Not that there are that many she doesn’t know. Betts: “She always has a lot of great information to tell us.”
Close: “More than they probably want.”
By Tuesday night, the Bruins are back on the court warming up as the reaffirmed No. 1 team in the nation, with some of those parkas on the bench, having been worn from the bus. It didn’t snow much there, but it's 16 degrees outside. The Mackey Arena crowd is sparse — 3,742 — due to a combination of no students on campus, the weather and the fact Purdue is 7-7 and has lost games by scores of 102-58, 99-51 and 82-52.
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One thing, though. If the Bruins glance up at the rafters, they can plainly see the banner for the Boilermakers’ 1999 women’s national championship. They’re the only Big Ten program to win it while a member of the conference. Back in Pauley Pavilion, there are 11 title banners for the UCLA men, and none for the women in the NCAA tournament, though they did win one in the old AIWA days. These Bruins would like to do something about that, and they have been considered a more serious contender than ever since they steamrolled then-No. 1 South Carolina 77-62 in November.
This one quickly became a rout. UCLA hits the first four shots for a 13-0 lead and the gap grew as large as 37, even as Close makes liberal use of her bench, and ends 83-49. Betts had 17 points and afterwards Purdue coach Katie Gearlds called her the best post in the country, a strong national player of the year candidate, and offered the highest praise a Boilermaker person could bestow. She said Betts reminds her of what Zach Edey could do.
Bottom line on the trip for UCLA: Two wins by 11 and 34 points, 80 minutes of basketball in the Midwestern winter and the Bruins led for 77 minutes and 44 seconds. So yeah, they seem to have adjusted pretty well to the Big Ten travel business.
But this is only the start. Later this month, they’ll have to cross the continent to play at Rutgers and Maryland, with a stop in New Jersey to face Baylor thrown in — that’s asking a lot. “But I chose that one,” Close said.
None of this sounds easy, but Close doesn’t mind. “You can’t have it all. If you want to be on TV more, you want to grow the game, you want to play in the No. 1 conference in the country, you’ve got to be willing to have some flexibility.”
That big charter is waiting for the late-night flight west. The Bruins leave Indiana with their parkas, which they’ll be glad to put back on the rack Wednesday. “I’ll be excited to be back in LA,” Betts said. “No offense to Indiana. Love you guys.”
None taken. It’s supposed to be 70 degrees in Los Angeles, but there's a serious crisis back home that has nothing to do with cold weather. Close ended her press conference by offering prayers for the firefighters and victims involved in the massive Pacific Palisades fire, which started six miles from campus. The UCLA community has been told to be on alert. All of this a long way from the traditional Big Ten territory in January, but now a part of it.
