UCLA WBB Coach Cori Close’s Two Keys to Winning the Mental Game

• By Grant Young

At the time of this article, the UCLA Bruins NCAA Women’s Basketball team is the No. 1 team in the country, as they have amassed a perfect 14-0 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. 

Cultivating mental toughness in basketball can be difficult because the pressure to perform consistently can lead to anxiety, making it hard to maintain focus under stress. Additionally, players must navigate the emotional highs and lows of competition, which can drain their mental resilience.

Continuous criticism from coaches and fans — especially at the game’s highest levels — can also undermine confidence, introducing self-doubt. Not to mention how each player's unique background and experiences shape their mental approach, making a one-size-fits-all strategy ineffective.

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. Coach Close was named the UCLA Women’s Head Basketball Coach in 2011 and is currently 291-140 overall. She joins Billie Moore (296-181) and Kathy Olivier (232-208) as the only coaches in program history to eclipse the 200-win milestone.

UCLA saw its second-consecutive 27-win season in the 2023-24 campaign, tying the third-most wins in a season in UCLA program history. The 2023-24 Bruins made a run to the Sweet Sixteen for the second-consecutive year under Close’s guidance; UCLA has reached at least the second round of the NCAA tournament in seven of the last nine seasons. UCLA crashed the boards as directed by Close and led the NCAA in rebounding margin (+13.9) for the 2023-24 season.

Coach Close’s ‘Cori Close - Coaching The Mental Game of Basketball’ conveys the key tactics she uses when instilling mental toughness within her Bruins basketball team. We have pulled perhaps the two most vital lessons of her course and included them below for you to glean and bring to your own team to enhance their mental strength. 

Refocusing vs Focusing

Coach Close stresses that coaches must emphasize to their players that basketball is a game that’s rooted in failure because this will teach them to not become overly upset or frustrated when it inevitably arrives. 

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 closing their eyes for a few moments, taking a deep breath, tying their shoes, or anything else that can be accomplished in a few seconds that can 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 (in which there are dozens if not hundreds) 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. This will not only help her players on the court, but will help them in life whenever their playing career come to an end. 

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 longtime friend and former WNBA player she knew who recently spoke to her team. This player (who was on the Los Angeles Sparks when they won the 2016 WNBA Championship) 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. 

Because this player had sacrificed as a teammate and done everything under their control to master her craft, they could 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 so that their conception of success and adversity isn’t tied to outcomes on the court.