Christmas comes twice a year for the UCLA women’s basketball team: once in December, and again in March.
“It feels like Christmas,” Bruins graduate student guard Camryn Brown said. “It genuinely does when tournament season comes around. You play all these games throughout the season to be your best in March for a tournament like this.”
Second-seeded UCLA is experiencing all the NCAA Tournament feelings again as the Bruins will make their 19th appearance in the tournament as a program. Their opponent, California Baptist, however, is just getting acquainted with it.
The teams will square off at 6:30 Saturday at Pauley Pavilion in the first round of the NCAA Tournament as part of the Albany Regional 2.
CBU (28-3), a No. 15 seed, is entering the tournament for the first time as a Division I program. The Lancers were an NAIA program before moving to NCAA Division II in the 2013-14 season and started the move to NCAA Division I in 2018.
The Lancers beat Stephen F. Austin in the WAC championship game Saturday to secure an automatic bid to the tournament.
“Sunday night, you do the selection show,” CBU coach Jarrod Olson said. “And then you kind of start processing, like, what just happened? Everything happens really fast from winning the conference tournament to doing the selection and now you’re in the NCAA Tournament. And I really had to kind of take a step back.”
Olson, who is in his 12th season at the helm for CBU, is also making his first appearance in the NCAA Tournament as a coach. The only player who has Division I tournament experience is 5-foot-5 guard Nae Nae Calhoun, who got there with Hawai’i in her junior year.
“We have no pressure against us. Just like when I was playing at Hawai’i, we had no pressure going in,” Calhoun said. “We’re the 15 team, so we can just go out there and play basketball. Show them who we are. Let the world know who CBU is.”
Calhoun, who played at North High in Riverside, is one of three players from the Riverside area who will take the court Saturday. UCLA’s Charisma Osborne is from Moreno Valley and Londynn Jones is from Riverside. All three played against each other at some point in their club basketball careers.
Jones said she has a lot of friends and family coming out for the game and grew up training in California Baptist’s facilities. She played basketball at Corona Centennial High School, which is just a 15-minute drive from CBU.
“It feels like home against home,” Jones said. “I think that’s really cool just to experience that and kind of put on for Riverside and the (Inland Empire). That means a lot.”
California Baptist has built a fanbase in Riverside and is embracing the opportunity to play close to home. The Lancers will be bringing their share of fans as the team embraces the opportunity to put the school, which has a total enrollment of 11,384, on a national stage.
CBU had five buses lined up as of Wednesday to bring roughly 1,400 supporters into Pauley Pavilion.
“We’ve had a team this year that really resonated with our community, with our school and with our fans,” Olson said. “It’s pretty cool to be able to say, ‘Hey, we’re taking not just our team to the NCAA Tournament. We’re taking CBU as a school and CBU as a community with us.’”
Neither team is getting lost in nostalgia, though, as the Albany Regional 2 features some of the most competitive teams in the tournament. In addition to UCLA (25-6), the top seeded teams are No. 1 Iowa, No. 3 LSU and No. 4 Kansas State. The first round at Pauley Pavilion will also host No. 7 seed Creighton and No. 10 UNLV this weekend.
UCLA practiced with a noticeable uptick in intensity Wednesday morning. There’s an emphasis on punching first and starting strong in the coming games when every moment counts, especially against a team like CBU that plays well in transition.
“Not many teams know how to play us,” Calhoun said. “We know who the best players are, but you don’t know who can give you 28 any given night. So people have to play us honest.”
Six CBU players are averaging 9.8 points per game or better, with 5-foot-8 guard and UC Irvine transfer Chloe Webb leading the group with 21.1 points per game. The WAC Player of the Year and WAC Tournament MVP also pulls down a team-best 8.1 rebounds per game.
Emily Sewell, a 6-foot-3 junior forward from Australia, is the only Lancer taller than 6 feet. She could match up with UCLA’s 6-foot-7 center Lauren Betts, who leads the team with 14.7 points and 9.0 rebounds per game and has 55 blocked shots in 27 games.
Osborne is embarking on her final NCAA Tournament after deciding to stay with the Bruins for one more season instead of beginning her professional career. The former Windward High star brings a stat line of 14.4 points and 4.9 rebounds per game.
The sophomore trio of Jones, Kiki Rice and Gabriela Jaquez also comes into the tournament a year wiser after falling to South Carolina in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament last season.
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Bruins head coach Cori Close has been to the tournament in 26 of her 31 seasons of coaching. She still gets that Christmastime feeling, which California Baptist will taste for the first time.
“This is just such a once-in-a-lifetime experience,” Close said. “And these kids, if you can give everything and just have no regrets in how you competed and how you prepared, then it’ll be something that stays with you for the rest of your life.”
No. 15 seed California Baptist (28-3) at No. 2 seed UCLA (25-6)
What: NCAA Tournament first round
When: 6:30 p.m. Saturday
Where: Pauley Pavilion
TV: ESPN2