After the Sooners fell to the Bruins in the Round of 32, Oklahoma coach Jennie Baranczyk reflected on her trio of redshirt-senior stars.
“They don’t hang out, but they respect each other,” Baranczyk said.
For UCLA women’s basketball guards Camryn Brown and Charisma Osborne, that statement doesn’t exactly resonate.
The veterans aren’t just teammates – they’re best friends.
“These four years wouldn’t have been anything without the person right here to my left,” Brown said after the Sweet 16. “I found one of my best friends in the world in college.”
And together, they helped rebuild the Bruins’ program this season.
Five brand-new faces arrived in Westwood last summer to begin training, and from the first whistle, the duo was committed to establishing a team culture that would instill sheer belief in the young squad.
“At the beginning of the year, they talked about that culture that we’re going to create,” said coach Cori Close. “It didn’t matter that we were unranked or that we had nine new players. They were going to make sure that we had great chemistry.”
The Bruins rattled off seven straight wins to commence the season and won the Battle 4 Atlantis title, avenging last year’s season-ending Women’s National Invitational Tournament semifinal loss to South Dakota State and upsetting then-No. 11 Tennessee along the way. UCLA then entered the rankings for the first time since November 2021.
That early-season win streak was snapped in a nine-point loss to No. 1 South Carolina in Columbia, South Carolina on Nov. 29. Four months later in the Sweet 16, the very same squad would cut UCLA’s season short with a 59-43 win, 100 miles away from the Gamecocks’ campus.
“We obviously wanted to go further in the tournament, but I think all of the veterans and all of the seniors really set the tone in how this season would go, especially with how last season went,” Osborne said.
The Bruins have been ranked every week since entering the poll and even spent some time in the top 10. They came back from a 16-point deficit to upset No. 1 seed Stanford in the Pac-12 tournament semifinals, secured hosting rights in March Madness, and exorcized their fourth-quarter demons against No. 5 seed Oklahoma in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
When just a year ago UCLA was making the trek to Wyoming and South Dakota to compete in the WNIT, the blue and gold was now in the national conversation and competing in front of nearly 13,000 spectators in the home state of the best team in the nation.
Close boiled it all down following the loss to South Carolina.
“I’ll remember this team by one word: growth.”
The turnaround in the span of a season likely would not have been as successful without Osborne and Brown anchoring the efforts, but Brown added that the freshmen were integral to the process.
“Shoutout to all of the freshmen and the people who just came in and followed and really bought into our entire system, our entire team, our program,” Brown said. “That’s what got us here today.
Close said the culture, cultivated by the veterans and carried on by the newcomers, will leave a legacy long after Osborne and Brown retire their UCLA jerseys.
“We obviously have a very bright future,” Close said. “We were the youngest team in the entire field of 68. … My responsibility as a leader is to dig in and really prepare us in a way that this experience changes us and pushes us forward.”
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