Cori Close has a challenge for you.
If you bring your kid to one of her pregame clinics at UCLA, don’t get caught up in the idea of her playing basketball there someday. At least not yet. Instead, as she works with the women’s basketball staff and players and soaks in the energy of game day, watch for her smile.
‘This hour-and-a-half clinic is not that important,’ says Close, the Bruins’ head women’s basketball coach. ‘The most important thing is that your daughter leaves having great joy for the game and having a great experience with her friends.’
When some girls get older and stick with the game, the smiles have vanished. Close sees the burden on their shoulders, the pressure to win, to perform, to justify the massive investments their parents have placed on their careers.
‘Everything has been leading towards, ‘Get a scholarship, get to college,’ ‘ Close tells USA TODAY Sports, ‘and then they get to us, and when they should have the most joy and the most freedom and the most good habits, they’re completely burned out.’
To fix them, Close says, it’s like peeling back an “onion of woundedness.” The wounds are deep and emotional, physical and mental. Despite a player’s convictions to play on, they need time to heal.
Under these layers of every young athlete lies the foundation of his or her athletic outlook. It’s shaped by the forces of parents, coaches and peers in their youth sports experience.
‘I see both sides of it,’ Close says. ‘I see the good, wind-in-your-sails side, the equipping side. And then I see the burdensome, pressurized, performance-oriented side that it’s saddening to see.’
As you watch her eighth-ranked Bruins begin their quest this week for a deep NCAA tournament run, she wants you to remember it won’t be all about the outcome. It will be more about her team’s shared journey.
Oh sure, Close burns to win – ‘It’s taken me several days to get over our semifinal loss to USC,’ she says – but she constantly fights the urge to look at sports as a series of results.
Instead, she operates under a lesson she learned from John Wooden: It’s not about her. The late UCLA men’s basketball coach knew it was about everyone – coaches, players and even parents – collaborating as one unit to create a life-altering experience.
Close shares lessons from her five decades of playing and coaching sports to help you create that experience for your athlete.
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1. ‘The real change-makers:’ Know that when you coach kids, John Wooden believes in you
It’s not about you, but it starts with you. Close began her college coaching career in 1994-95 on UCLA’s staff, and in Wooden’s den, listening to the legendary coach’s instruction. The experience changed her life, but it also helped her appreciate there were so many others who did, too.
‘Coach Wooden taught me that, really, some of the best culture-builders, teachers of the game, coaches are at youth levels,’ Close says. ‘We may get interviewed more, but they’re the real change-makers.’
The best role models are sometimes the ones whose names others wouldn’t recognize. There are Steve Cain, the boys basketball coach at Milpitas High, in the San Francisco Bay Area, who lived up the street from Close. He told her to get her elbow underneath the ball, or bounce it harder, when she dribbled by his house.
There was Julie Plank, a future coach in the WNBA but then an assistant coach at Stanford, who pulled her aside at a college camp and told her “you can do this” when others called her too short and too slow.
And there was her father, Don Close, a former small-college football player who believed in the teaching powers of sports. Don Close taught academic subjects at Milpitas and character-building, leadership and self-esteem to its teams and to Cori and her friends.
‘I think he was a girl dad before he really knew what that was,’ she says.
Her UCLA women’s basketball team takes roots in the soccer experience her dad created.
‘When I play up at Stanford every year, several people from my youth soccer team come,’ says Close, 52, ‘and they don’t come because we won a lot of soccer games. They come because my dad had a program and not a team. My dad taught lessons and made them feel loved unconditionally. And, they, to this day, still come back. In fact, two of them spoke at my dad’s memorial service.
‘It was a soccer relationship, not a soccer team.’
2. ‘Get out of the pity pond’: Look at adversity as an opportunity
Like his daughter, Don Close was an intense competitor who wanted to do everything he could to win. But losing was never about why it happened. It was about how she could use it to her advantage.
How can you grow through this?
How can you be a better teammate?
How can you be a better leader?
Those were the kind of questions Close heard from her dad when she was a senior guard at UC Santa Barbara and her team was 0-6 but coming off a 27-5 season.
‘The late (N.C. State women’s basketball) coach (Kay) Yow used to say, ‘You can twinkle your feet in the pity pond, but you can’t swim laps.’ And I think the reality was, I was swimming laps, and my dad was like, ‘Get out of the pity pond and make a difference,’ ‘ she says. ‘ ‘You can’t control some of that other stuff.’ ‘
His words made Close think about of her six freshman teammates.
“Instead of looking at it, like, ‘They’re such a pain in my side,’ ” she says, “I’m like, ‘How can I serve them better? How can I make their jobs easier? How can I make them better?’ And it’s sort of like the shine theory, right? That the more you shine, and help others shine, it actually multiplies your own.”
3. ‘Banners hang in gyms, rings collect dust:’ Create your own story
Close was an associate women’s head coach at UC-Santa Barbara and Florida State before she became UCLA’s head coach in 2011.
When she first arrived in Westwood, she asked 10 men’s and 10 women’s basketball alums what they wished the school had provided for them but didn’t. She heard about financial planning and mental health tools, not basketball.
Another of those former players, John Vallely, sought out Close to tell her about the profound strength of Wooden’s teachings and the love that emanated from them. The coach, he said, was the reason why his marriage had longevity, why he had started a few businesses, conquered cancer multiples times and survived the death of his young daughter.
He didn’t mention to Close he was the starting point guard on two of Wooden’s national championship teams.
‘I just thought, ‘That’s it,’ Close says. ‘How many John Vallely stories can we create? It doesn’t diminish the competitive excellence at all. In fact, maybe it is exactly what led to it and equipped it.’
A few years into Close’s head coaching tenure, Joshua Medcalf, then UCLA’s director of mental conditioning, brought her team into center court of Pauley Pavilion.
‘I hope I’m at that banner-raising ceremony,’ he told her players. ‘I hope your habits lead you to exactly that. But banners hang in gyms.
‘That ring ceremony is going to be sweet because of the character it’s going to take to earn that. But rings just sit in trophy cases and collect dust.
‘The only two things that are gonna to stay with you for the rest of your life, from these four years, is who you become and who you impact.’
When Close told me that story, I thought about how I never won an outright championship in 10 years as a youth sports coach. But I sometimes pull out a note from a parent in my desk drawer. It focused not on our winning season but in my faith in his son.
More Coach Steve: What young athletes can learn from the legendary John Wooden
4. ‘Be a good listener:’ Everybody is important in the journey (especially parents)
As we all know, other parents can be an issue in youth sports. Close watches their behavior in the stands at AAU games and listens carefully to what they say to her in conversations. It’s all part of her recruiting process.
They watch her, too. One UCLA parent who didn’t like something the coach said in a news conference requested a Zoom conversation, which Close obliged the next day.
‘I’m a big believer that performance equals potential minus interferences,’ she says. ‘And sometimes, if the lines of communication are not open, it becomes an interference for the kids, because they are caught in the middle of an unsolvable solution for them.’
About a year ago, Close emulated a habit of South Carolina coach Dawn Staley. She established a semi-regular Zoom call with her players’ parents. She tells them about her growth mindset. She tells them they can call her, even about playing time. And she tells them to be prepared for her answers.
‘You have to be ready for the reality and the truth that’s leading to those decisions,’ she says.
Close, like you as a coach of kids, ultimately makes the team decisions. But it’s more important, she says, for everyone to feel heard than for her to be right.
‘It doesn’t mean I have to change the standards,’ she says. ‘But a way that I can serve them is to be a good listener.’
5. ‘It’s not Kumbaya and a sorority:’ Embrace sports for the joy and also the struggle
UCLA will enter its eighth NCAA tournament under Close. The runs include an elite Eight and five Sweet 16 appearances. When the losses come, they are deeply felt.
When her team was upset at home by Washington State on Jan. 28, Close took several moments to compose herself before her opening statement.
‘This one will be measured by everybody else on the outside by the end score,’ she began, her voice shaking. ‘But it won’t be measured that way for me. What Kiki and the rest of her teammates, what they showed from the inside out, you have no idea.’
Her Bruins team, which was dealing with injuries and illness and was missing leading scorer Lauren Betts, almost came back to win after trailing by 20 points.
‘They pre-decided they were gonna give everything, and they were gonna finish empty with and for each other,’ Close said. ‘And there’s no doubt that they did that.’
At one point, when Close couldn’t get her words out, guard Kike Rice, who was sitting next to her, said, “I got it,” and answered the question.
‘As usual, covering for me,’ Close said with a smile.
In our interview, Close recalled a conversation with a coach the day after winning a national championship. It seemed to lack similar emotion.
‘How do you feel?’ Close asked.
‘A little empty,’ the coach replied.
Close was surprised. This was supposed to be the pinnacle.
‘I just think outcome-oriented thinking is really empty,’ she says.
The joy of sports, and the growth you get out of them, she has realized, doesn’t just come in the results. It can come alongside the struggles, too.
‘I’m not talking about just having fun all the time; it’s not Kumbaya and a sorority,’ Close says. ‘It’s healthy to have real struggle when you miss your first four shots, or when the ref makes a bad call, or you don’t agree with the coach, or you’re having trouble conquering a skill. Those are really healthy struggles.
‘But I also want there to be great joy, and joy is not dependent upon your circumstances. Joy is a choice, a skill, a deeper thing.’
And we can find it even when we lose.
Steve Borelli, aka Coach Steve, has been an editor and writer with USA TODAY since 1999. He spent 10 years coaching his two sons’ baseball and basketball teams. He and his wife, Colleen, are now sports parents for a high schooler and middle schooler. His column is posted weekly. For his past columns, click here.