UCLA women’s basketball win first NCAA championship
The Bruins were unstoppable in their first NCAA Division I national championship appearance.
UCLA danced.
Although South Carolina beat unbeaten UConn — the defending national champions — in the 2026 NCAA Division I women’s Final Four, the Gamecocks’ intense defense and accurate free-throw shooting didn’t stand out in the final game.
But, the Bruins were seemingly on cruise control, going on to win their first NCAA title by taking down a legacy powerhouse 79-51.
All five of UCLA’s starters and their sixth woman off the bench are likely to be drafted in just one week to begin their WNBA careers.
Lauren Betts was the go-to player for the Bruins securing herself a double-double with 14 points and 11 rebounds, and helping UCLA in outrebounding South Carolina 49-36.
The paint is where UCLA scored most of their points to earn the crown, but even Gamecock’s player Ta’Niya Latson admitted it was the little things that got UCLA to the final buzzer up 28 points over South Carolina — the largest women’s National Championship margin of victory ever.
In a postgame interview with ESPN, Latson said, “Every rebound, they got second, third, and fourth chance points…We didn’t do the little things, we didn’t do the intangibles.”
South Carolina had no answer for the smothering defense of the Bruins, who continued to level up throughout the matchup, giving the Gamecocks no chance at keeping up.
South Carolina began the game with the worst field goal percentage in a single half since 2022 versus North Dakota State, and went two for 15 from the three.
The fourth overall one seed’s offense was largely nonexistent with only one starter, Tessa Johnson, getting into double figures, with the rest of their starters shooting 25 percent from the floor.
With only one loss, UCLA was second in the nation in offensive efficiency and 18th in the nation in defensive efficiency, though the offenses they have broken all season would argue differently.
Cori Close, head coach of the Bruins and longest tenured coach at a single university to win a National Championship, had been building character on her roster since the first game of the year with the Bruins.
She told ESPN, “all year we’ve been saying the talent is our floor, but our character will determine our ceiling.”
Possession by possession they built their National Championship, and the grit they showed from the opening tipoff was something to be envied and duplicated by every team watching; but this National Championship showing was also built by each and every game and step that the Bruins have taken this year and in recent years.
Kiki Rice came to the Bruins in 2022 as the No. 2 recruit in the country at the same time that Betts was headed to Stanford, but Close’s hard work and mindset brought the two together to create the cornerstones of what would be a masterful women’s basketball team.
Thank you for reading Female Athlete News. Clara Romae Slowinski is a student-intern at Penn State University.