How UCLA’s super senior class, led by Lauren Betts, set the championship standard

They were coming into the gym before scheduled workouts and practices. They were more locked in to their mental preparation and film work. The Bruins have a leadership council that acts as a go-between for the players and coaches every season.

So many people wanted to participate before the 2025-26 season that the coaching staff had to turn them away. “The way this team has embraced the hard and the work ethic and showing up early, staying late, it’s definitely shifted the culture in a great way,” Onyenwere said. The UCLA assistant coach was easily able to identify the source of that change.

For three years, Kiki Rice and Gabriela Jaquez had laid the foundation for a new Bruins era. They wanted to be in the gym all the time, and their work ethic was UCLA’s baseline. When their cultural impact coalesced with a massive talent infusion through the transfer portal, the Bruins captured their first championship in the NCAA era by routing South Carolina 79-51 on Sunday.

The seniors accounted for every point UCLA scored, starting with the two who had been Bruins for their entire college career. Rice’s calming poise and Jaquez’s relentless motor were the twin pillars of the team’s win, as they have been for much of their four-year tenure. But the program was able to ascend to another level when 6-foot-7 transfer Lauren Betts arrived from Stanford as a genuine superstar who changed the way the Bruins were able to play and the way other teams had to defend them.