Four women’s basketball teams will pile into Pauley Pavilion this weekend for the opening round of the NCAA Tournament: No. 2 seed UCLA, No. 7 Creighton, No. 10 UNLV and No. 15 Cal Baptist.
“We’re gonna have our work cut out for us just right here in LA,” UCLA head coach Cori Close told reporters on Sunday.
“People may not know how good Creighton really is or Cal Baptist and sometimes I think people get all excited about name recognition, but we may have one of the most difficult and complete first and second rounds.”
The teams make up one of four groups in the Albany Regional 2, which is one of the most challenging regionals in the bracket with UCLA, No. 1 Iowa, No. 3 LSU and No. 4 Kansas State in the mix. UCLA, Iowa and LSU were ranked in the top eight in the most recent AP Top 25 rankings and Kansas State was the 15th-ranked team.
The Bruins will begin their climb against Riverside’s Cal Baptist (28-3) on Saturday at 6:30 p.m. Close said that she had watched the Lancers’ 75-74 win over Stephen F. Austin in the WAC championship game, but had no other connections with the team beyond speaking on panels about international recruiting alongside coach Jarrod Olson.
“He’s really good. It’s been good consistently,” Close said. “But the reality is, right after this (press conference), I’m going to go to our scouting staff meetings and we will have more film that we know what to do with almost instantaneously. But I will tell you, they have my respect and we will not overlook anything.”
Cal Baptist has had a steady ascent through the ranks of college basketball. The Lancers competed as an NAIA program since 1969 before moving to NCAA Division II in the 2013-14 season. They began the transition to NCAA Division I in 2018.
The Lancers won the WAC regular season title this season and came back from an 11-point deficit to capture their first WAC Tournament title in four years for an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.
Chloe Webb, a…
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