Cori Close – Coaching from the Heart!

Cori Close was named The Michael Price Family UCLA Women’s Head Basketball Coach on April 21, 2011, and is currently 287-140 (.672) overall. This year, Coach Close led the Bruins to a 30-win season, at one point winning 23 in a row, 22 by double digit margins.  The regular season ended with a Big Ten Conference Tournament Championship and a number one overall seed in the 2025 Women’s NCAA Tournament.  For all of this, Close was named the Women’s Coach of the Year by the US Basketball Writers Association.

This strong season was preceded by UCLA’s second-consecutive 27-win season in the 2023-24 campaign, tying the third-most wins in a season in UCLA program history. After that season, Close was named the recipient of the 2024 WBCA Carol Eckman Integrity in Coaching Award, the Women's Basketball Coaches Association (WBCA) announced in February of 2024. The WBCA presents the award annually to an active member coach who exemplifies Eckman's spirit, integrity and character through sportsmanship, commitment to the student-athlete, honesty, ethical behavior, courage and dedication to purpose.

Prior to becoming the head coach at UCLA in 2011, her first head coaching position, Close spent time as an assistant at UCLA, an assistant/associate head coach at UC Santa Barbara, and as an associate head coach at Florida State University.  Coach Close has also had success coaching for USA basketball, having been on the USA Basketball staff for three gold-medal winning teams.  In 2021, following gold at the FIBA U19 World Cup, Close was named the co-recipient of the 2021 USA Basketball Developmental Coach of the Year Award, sharing with 2021 USA Men’s U19 head coach Jamie Dixon.

Takeaways:

When it comes to the PURSUIT of COMPLETE as we talk about often, there are few better than Coach Close.  In our conversation, she seemed to cover all bases, discussing how she builds her team and herself from within, building both foundations on all the right things.  Some of my main takeaways from the conversation are

1. Building a principle-based culture.  I love how coach uses this phrase so naturally.  She mentions the three core aspects of her culture – having a growth mindset, being a person of gratitude, and being a lifestyle giver and truly wants these to serve her players during their stay at UCLA and beyond.  She also mentions that if she’s not continually working on herself, then her ability to build and maintain this culture for her players will be limited.  This could not be more important in today’s world of NIL and the transfer portal – having a coach that is truly and genuinely concerned with building herself into her best version so she can then give the best to them…could be the difference between some of them staying at UCLA or going elsewhere. 
2. I love how Coach talks about her goal of having practice be her players’ best 2 hours of their day.  She mentions how over a player’s career, the games are only 4% of their time.  As Coach makes clear, the best way to do this is to make the time she has with them the best mix of work, competition and the true essence of TEAM that she can make it. 
3. Gratitude.  This is a big one for Coach, as it should be.  I like how she has decided to add to one of her mantras of  – “Doesn’t matter. Get better.” Now, it’s “Doesn’t matter.  Get better.  Practice gratitude.”  Here, she makes the great point that if you do nothing with your thoughts – 80% of them will be negative. So, we have to be intentional with our thoughts and especially with including gratitude as it is our biggest weapon v. negativity.  Whether it’s focusing on somebody special in your life, something that went well today…whatever works best.  Where gratitude is in our head, negativity cannot be.
4. There are few things better than having a positive impact on others.  But, Coach does a great job of explaining that if she isn’t working on herself first, then her ability to impact others will be limited.  Coach mentioned that she really tries to spend time each day quietly working on herself so that she can bring her best to her team.  She clearly has a lot of gifts to give..but as she says, it takes this CONSISTENT and INTENTIONAL work to maintain and build them…so that their impact on her team can be maximized.   
5. When Coach was talking about Winning with Class, she confirmed for us that leaders need to lead from place of humility.  As she made clear, this is absolutely NOT a weakness – instead, it’s a STRENGTH.  Further confirmation that, as we’ve heard from other guests, winning with class is the uncommon path and it takes STRENGTH!!!!
6. Finally, Coach Close’s answer as to why we need BOTH winning and class as a pursuit was perfect:  She said if some of her players asked her why both winning and class are important, she would ask them about the best moments in their lives. Most of the time, the answers would be not as much about wins on the court, but more about when they served others or overcame hard things and grew from the adversity.  She also pointed out that yes, we do forget this as we are frantically chasing wins…but, that’s just another reason to stay intentional and consistent as we mentioned before in terms of our PURSUIT of COMPLETE – bringing both winning AND class into all we do.

Please follow Coach Close and The UCLA Bruins:

Links:

Website:

uclabruins.com

X/Instagram:

@uclawbb

@coachcoriclose