UCLA women used mental conditioning to reach title game

PHOENIX – Kiki Rice can unleash one skill that’s more wicked than any crossover dribble, more deadly than any pull-up jumper, more assured than a Euro step on her unstoppable drives toward the basket.

It’s her reset routine.

Whenever the UCLA point guard’s team went on a huge run or committed a bad turnover or really did anything that might put it on the verge of getting too high or too low Friday night in the Women’s Final Four, the Bruins kept reminding each other to reset.

For Rice, that meant looking up at the banners and jerseys inside the Mortgage Matchup Center and taking a deep breath. For sharpshooter Gianna Kneepkens, it was taking a deep breath and telling herself, “You’ve got this.”

For point guard Charlisse Leger-Walker, it was taking a deep breath, closing her eyes and placing her hand on her stomach to feel her breathing. She used the routine after Texas point guard Rori Harmon had stolen the ball from her at halfcourt.

Perhaps it was no coincidence what happened next.

“I was like, ‘You know what, like, reset, you’re fine, next play,’ ” Leger-Walker said, “and then we had a really good little run.”

The reset routine is just part of a mental conditioning program led by assistant coach Tasha Brown that the Bruins credit for providing an edge on the way to the first NCAA championship game appearance in school history.

UCLA (36-1) will face fellow top seed South Carolina (36-3) on Sunday afternoon in a game that’s both the biggest of the Bruins’ college careers and one that has a familiar feel based on the work they’ve completed in what Brown likes to call the “mind gym.”

“The stage doesn’t get bigger, the standards stay the same, the process is still the process,” Brown told the California Post on Saturday outside the UCLA locker room, “and what we do is what we do.”

While she’s not a licensed psychologist – freely acknowledging, with a laugh, that her college degree is in mathematics – Brown has developed a knack for helping players become the most confident, centered and present versions of themselves.

“She made me a believer,” said sixth-year guard Angela Dugalic, a former skeptic. “She does show, here and there, some corny videos, but the way she speaks about things, you see how much she believes in it and you almost just feel like you have to believe in it.”

Before practices, players are shown highlight clips of their making the right plays. Since research has shown that the brain can’t differentiate between a real physical repetition and an imagined one, watching themselves do something well is like getting an extra practice rep.

Players also write down affirmations of their achievements and complete feedback sessions in which they say what they respect, appreciate and need from each other.

Much of Brown’s work with the team revolves around self-image, self-awareness and self-talk. A core philosophy is to talk to yourself, don’t listen to yourself.

“Every thought that you think is not a true thought,” Brown said, “so it could be, I sucked today, I can’t make any shots. Well, that’s not true, you missed two shots. So it’s really learning how to know your triggers and then speak truth to how you feel because your feelings are valid, they’re indicators, but they’re not always true.”

After serving as a liaison between outside psychologists and players, adopting some of their concepts along the way, Brown was tapped to become the team’s de facto psychologist two years ago. It seemed like an obvious move based on her natural gift for teaching and how easily she connected with everyone on the team.

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“They loved everybody that had taught us,” UCLA coach Cori Close said of her players, “but they said Coach T is so passionate about it and she’s here every day. That was a really turning point.”

Dugalic called mental conditioning “the future of basketball,” saying other teams should invest in it similarly to the Bruins. It could be just as essential to winning as skill development or learning opponent tendencies.

“We’ve got high-performing athletes who are perfections and want to get everything right and basketball’s an imperfect game,” Brown said, “so how do we learn how to control our thoughts and our emotions so that we get back to, hey, this is how I feel, but this is what I need to do right now? And so in the middle of that is a neutral and there’s a reset and how fast can we get throughout the season to resetting and getting to neutral and moving on.”

This time of year, with most teams evenly matched, Close said the mental part of the game is more important than the physical. Having a mindset that allows one to reset when things go wrong – or right – could make all the difference.

“I mean, when you’re at this stage, everyone is very talented, everyone competes at a high level,” Rice said. “To be able to just find those small areas where you can kind of level up on your opponent, it matters, and I think just being able to play really tough, play really present-minded and just be very focused on the moment is huge.”