PHOENIX — For the primary time in a very long time, a Division 1 faculty basketball nationwide championship crew resides in Westwood.
UCLA ladies’s basketball routed South Carolina 79-51 in downtown Phoenix on Sunday to say the varsity’s first nationwide championship in women’s basketball since 1978. The victory additionally marked the varsity’s first basketball title basically since 1995.
This national championship was UCLA’s first since ladies’s faculty hoops started being ruled by the NCAA within the 1981-82 season.
“I’ve been saying it all day but I don’t even know how else to say it: it’s immeasurably more than I could ask (for) or imagine,” UCLA head coach Cori Close mentioned. “I’m actually grateful. It’s not about me.
“It’s about watching these incredible young women be dream chasers, to watch them grow in ways that they will remember and it will stick with them for the rest of their lives.”
The Lady Bruins busted a transfer to rejoice their dominant win over South Carolina and NCAA title.
Last yr’s was UCLA’s first NCAA Final Four, capitalizing to win all of it this yr after dancing all the way in which again. pic.twitter.com/2maoytksQm
— Arizona Sports (@AZSports) April 5, 2026
Sometimes basketball comes all the way down to which crew could make its open appears and which crew can’t. This was the case Sunday at Mortgage Matchup Center.
The Bruins shot 43.5% within the sport whereas South Carolina shot 29%, lacking makeable try after makeable try.
UCLA’s win was a collective effort by their group of gifted seniors nevertheless it was ahead Gabriela Jaquez whose play rose above the remaining.
Jaquez appeared to be close to the motion all through, together with a second early within the sport when she soared in to seize an offensive rebound and made the following layup regardless of being fouled.
Jaquez flirted with a triple-double, scoring 21 factors, grabbing 10 rebounds and shelling out 5 assists.
“For me, just really focusing on defense and rebounding,” Jaquez mentioned. “That was a giant a part of our scouting report. I had open pictures and I made them. I believe that was simply form of what it was.
“Just super proud of this group and how we played as a team to get this victory.”
The senior’s rebounding effort was a part of a masterclass on the glass by the Bruins. UCLA dominated the boards, 49-37. The Bruins had 21 offensive rebounds and 25 second-chance factors.
Their 28-point win was the third-largest in nationwide championship sport historical past. The 37-1 Bruins ended the season on a 31-game profitable streak.
For South Carolina, the loss marks the second consecutive season the Gamecocks have been blown out within the nationwide title sport.
Last season, South Carolina was stomped 82-59 by Paige Bueckers, Azzi Fudd and UConn within the championship sport in Tampa, Florida.
Gamecocks head coach Dawn Staley should wait no less than one other season to hitch Pat Summitt, Geno Auriemma and Kim Mulkey within the group of Division 1 ladies’s basketball coaches with 4 nationwide titles.
“I thought (the Bruins) came out and disrupted from a defensive standpoint,” Staley mentioned. “Then they beautiful a lot obtained what they needed offensively. When they did it, they created second-chance alternatives.
“We just didn’t have it today. They were the better team today. Congratulations to them.”
John Wooden’s legacy lives on at UCLA
When one thinks about UCLA basketball, legendary males’s coach John Wooden involves thoughts.
Wooden, who died in 2010, led the Bruins to 10 nationwide titles within the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies. He coached legendary gamers, comparable to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Bill Walton.
Close, who had a relationship with Walton, spoke about how the icon would have reacted to this season’s ladies’s title.
“I think coach Wooden actually wouldn’t care as much about the championship as much as he would about staying true to our process,” Close mentioned. “I hope I might make him proud by realizing and recognizing that it is a by-product of what’s occurred of their habits, of their love for one another, in committing to a course of over a protracted time period.
“When you just look at how the pyramid of success is built, the foundations, I just think he would be way more interested in hearing about that journey than he would about the final product because he knows that’s a by-product of what was happening on the inside.”
