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Well prepared UCLA women look forward to South Carolina’s challenge

March 24, 2023

The UCLA women’s basketball team will make its eighth Sweet 16 appearance in the NCAA tournament on Saturday. The game will be on the biggest stage of the season and against arguably the best opponent they’ve faced all season: reigning national champion South Carolina.

The Bruins played the Gamecocks in late November and lost by nine points. Since then, South Carolina has gone on to earn the overall No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament after an unbeaten season. But a lot has happened for fourth-seeded UCLA since that time, too.

“That game was at the beginning of the year,” graduate student Gina Conti said. “We’ve learned a lot, we’ve faced a lot of different adversity and stacked it on top of each other. I’m excited that we get another go-around to play them.”

UCLA (27-9) will face South Carolina (34-0) at 11 a.m. at Bon Secours Wellness Arena in Greenville, South Carolina, after beating Sacramento State and Oklahoma in the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament.

The Bruins are 12-6 in road games this season and Saturday’s game could bring an intense crowd. The Gamecocks had an attendance of over 10,000 people in Columbia, South Carolina for their second-round game against South Florida.

UCLA will rely on the depth and maturity after rotating 10 players in for almost every game lately. The five freshmen average 19 minutes of playing time and three have played in all 36 games.

“We have a good mix of healthy naivety from the freshmen,” coach Cori Close said. “I think sometimes that serves them well. They don’t know that they’re not supposed to win. But then there’s also maturity of like, Charisma (Osborne), where they know what it takes. In those moments, we are going to look to Charisma to be our steadying force.”

Osborne, a senior, scored a career-high 36 points in UCLA’s last outing against Oklahoma. That’s the most points scored in a postseason game by any player in UCLA program history. Throughout the season, she’s reached double digits in scoring in 30 games.

Kiki Rice leads the freshmen and has started in 35 games this season. She’s the second-leading scoring player on the team with 11.9 points per game. Londynn Jones, Lina Sontag, Gabriela Jaquez and Christeen Iwuala round out the freshman group.

“All of us were the best from wherever we went to, but that’s not enough because everybody’s so good,” Iwuala said of the freshmen. “So what else can you bring besides the talent that got you to where you were, like, say in high school and stuff? I feel like that’s a big question in what we have here.”

South Carolina beat its first two opponents of the NCAA tournament — Norfolk State and South Florida — by a combined 63 points.

The Gamecocks, led by head coach Dawn Staley and her 400 wins, average 81 points per game while holding opponents to roughly 50 points. Zia Cooke averages 15.3 points each game and has made 61-of-169 3-pointers this season, but the Bruins are also keying in on Aliyah Boston (13.1 ppg) and Kamilla Cardoso (9.7 ppg) and South Carolina’s overall ability to score in transition.

Close said that South Carolina will have to contain a lot of what the Bruins can do, too.

“We actually probably have more ways in which we can score offensively than they do,” the 12th-year coach said. “We’ve got a lot of weapons offensively that they have to prepare for and so we’ve gotta make sure we use them all.”

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Emily Bessoir, a redshirt-sophomore, has been a big piece of UCLA’s scoring. She’s third on the team with 9.4 points per game and leads the team in rebounds with 5.8 per game. Conti has the most assists on the team with 115 and averages 3.3 assists per game.

UCLA is putting faith in the growth it has had since the last time facing South Carolina. There’s been a serious tone to this week’s preparations, but there’s also room for letting loose. It’s not uncommon to catch the Bruins holding mini dance parties when there’s a break in the work.

“We’ve done all the preparation already,” Conti said. “We’re not cramming things in. It’s not like we’re studying last-minute things. So by the time we get to that point where we’re dancing in a locker room, we should already know our stuff. We just trust that everyone’s put the work in.”

UCLA (27-9) vs. South Carolina (34-0)

When: 11 a.m. Saturday

Where: Bon Secours Wellness Arena, Greenville, South Carolina

TV: ESPN

Orange County Register

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Well prepared UCLA women look forward to South Carolina’s challenge

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UCLA (27-9) vs. South Carolina (34-0)

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