UCLA Basketball Coach Cori Close’s Mom Patti Is Known to the Team as “Mother Bruin”
UCLA women's basketball coach Cori Close credits her late father, Don, with shaping her coaching philosophy. Her mother, Patti, known as 'Mother Bruin,' still travels with the team at 80. Here's what to know about both.
Get to Know UCLA Basketball Cori Close’s Parents Alika Jenner - Getty Images "Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links. " Cori Close has been the head coach of women’s basketball at UCLA since 2011, building one of the most consistent programs in the country over more than a decade. Before taking the Bruins job, she spent seven seasons as associate head coach at Florida State, where she helped establish the Seminoles as a nationally recognized program, and had an earlier stint on the UCLA staff in 1994 and 1995.
She played for the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she was a team captain in 1992 and 1993 and led the Gauchos to back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances. The 2024-25 season was among the best of her tenure, when UCLA made its first-ever Final Four appearance and won the Big Ten Tournament championship. Close swept all four major national Coach of the Year awards: the Associated Press, Naismith, USBWA, and WBCA honors.
Despite that success, Close has been candid about the pressures of coaching in the current college sports environment. “I’ve considered going to the WNBA,” she told The Sporting Tribune . “I’ve had opportunities and I’ve said, ‘Not yet.
’” Cori has credited her commitment to her players as the primary reason for staying, though the decision, she has acknowledged, grows more complicated each year. She also told USA Today in 2024 that the way she has shaped the UCLA women's basketball team is rooted in the soccer experience her dad coached for her and her friends when she was young. “I think he was a girl dad before he really knew what that was,” she said.