UCLA women prove theyre tough enough to handle

SACRAMENTO — The group that can’t stop dancing received’t stop dancing.

The top-seeded UCLA women’s basketball group beat Duke 70-58 in the Elite Eight. It wasn’t balletic, but stunning.

Sunday’s sport at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento wasn’t a enjoyable, free-flowing pleasure trip that so many of the Bruins’ wins have been this season.

It was a rattling, teeth-gritting, heart-thumping roller-coaster trip — weeeeee!

The Bruins weren’t having enjoyable, precisely. They had been having the time of their lives.

And in the end, they shoved their method to the entrance of the stage — and back to the Final Four.

Now the TikTok countdown is on before remaining exams in Phoenix, where redemption and legacy and a rematch await with either winner of the No. 1 Texas vs. No. 2 Michigan tussle in the Fort Worth Regional remaining.

And any questions — ahem, mine — about how the barely-battled-tested boogie-down Bruins reply to a vital stress check had been answered.

The Bruins are constructed for this.

They’re not just proficient. And they’re not just proficient dancers (and postgame, Lauren Betts, Charlisse Leger-Walker and Gabriela Jaquez reprised the routine that went viral when they did it with the UCLA Dance Team during halftime of a males’s sport this season).

They’re tough. And they’re locked in.

And not like last season, when their program’s Final Four debut ended in a 85-51 national semifinal blowout loss to eventual champion Connecticut, they’re prepared for what comes next.

They tell us in the second half Sunday.

Duke got here floating in, still buzzing from Friday’s buzzer-beater in the Sweet 16. That slow-motion-in-real-time three-pointer by Ashlon Jackson that rolled around and around the rim as though the basketball gods needed just a little more time to decide UCLA’s opponent Sunday.

It was to be Duke, who proved a harmful No. 3 seed. The Bruins weren’t ready for the Blue Devils to be so ready for them, trailing at the break for just the second time this season. The first time was in November against Texas, when the Bruins — now a program-record 35-1 — suffered their only loss this season.

Still their only loss.

Even a idiot might read the willpower on the Bruins’ faces as they roared back from a 39-31 halftime deficit; they’d come so far together, but they so badly needed to go additional.

No one was prepared to get off the trip, not least the six seniors who performed the whole lot of the second half, seizing momentum and the second and hitting the Blue Devils (27-9) with a white-knuckled flurry of exercise.

“Compliment them,” Duke coach Kara Lawson said, “for turning up their defensive intensity.”

There had been 50-50 balls in identify only, because UCLA appeared to be successful 100% of them.

UCLA gamers had been ripping away passes. They had been diving all over the ground and had been all over the boards. They ratcheted up the depth so a lot it unfold into the stands, where the largely pro-Bruins crowd of 9,627 cheered deliriously.

Shots began falling. Turnovers stopped cascading. UCLA discovered its rhythm.

And UCLA’s 6-foot-7 star middle Betts did what she does, with 15 factors, eight rebounds and two blocks in the second half, of which she performed all 20 minutes.

“I was just pretty mad,” she said. “You know, my senior season is on the line, so I kind of got to wake up a little bit.”

Angela Dugalic continued to be the matchup nightmare she has been all March; the 6-4 sixth lady scored 15 well timed factors to take some stress off Betts.

UCLA coach Cori Close watches play during the Bruins’ win over Duke on Sunday.

(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)

“I’m just so proud of her,” Betts said. “The confidence and her poise … you could get in your head in moments when we’re down … but she did all the right things and what we needed at the time.”

It was an entertaining Elite Eight conflict that was introduced to you by two coaches who staged, like up-and-coming cooks, under two of the best leaders the sports activities world has identified.

UCLA coach Cori Close and Lawson dedicated to making sure we received’t lose John Wooden’s and Pat Summitt’s recipes — never thoughts all the seismic, disorienting shifts taking place in school sports activities.

A former Tennessee star, Lawson brings Summitt’s model crackling depth to Duke, a mindset that she’s said calls for supreme confidence, chasing excellence and holding oneself to an all-around normal of success.

UCLA’s bench was uplifted all season by Close’s heat intentionality, realized from years of mentorship from Wooden. The main ingredients, she’ll inform you, requiring a dollop of growth, gratitude, of giving and not taking.

“[Our] team culture is not this nebulous thing or phrases on a wall,” Close said. “It’s a group of people that are willing to be committed to the hard, right behaviors over and over again. I cannot tell you how many times throughout that game we referred to our values, who we are, what our identity was, what we had to get back to.

“… I’m just really humbled and thankful to be a part of a team and staff that cares about things from the inside out. What you saw on the court is a reflection and a byproduct of what’s happened on the inside.”