Get to Know UCLA Basketball Coach Cori Close’s Family
Cori Close has been the head coach of women’s basketball at UCLA since 2011, constructing one of the vital constant packages within the nation over greater than a decade. Before taking the Bruins job, she spent seven seasons as affiliate head coach at Florida State, the place she helped set up the Seminoles as a nationally acknowledged program, and had an earlier stint on the UCLA employees in 1994 and 1995. She performed for the University of California, Santa Barbara, the place she was a staff captain in 1992 and 1993 and led the Gauchos to back-to-back NCAA Tournament appearances.
The 2024-25 season was among the many better of his tenure, when UCLA made its first-ever Final Four look and gained the Big Ten Tournament championship. Close swept all 4 main nationwide Coach of the Year awards: the Associated Press, Naismith, USBWA, and WBCA honors.
Despite that success, Close has been candid in regards to the pressures of teaching within the present faculty sports activities setting. “I’ve considered going to the WNBA,” she advised The Sporting Tribune. “I’ve had opportunities and I’ve said, ‘Not yet.’”
Cori has credited her dedication to her gamers as the first cause for staying, though the choice, she has acknowledged, grows extra sophisticated every year. She additionally advised USA Today in 2024 that the way in which she has formed the UCLA girls’s basketball staff is rooted within the soccer expertise her dad coached for her and her mates when she was younger. “I think he was a girl dad before he really knew what that was,” she mentioned.
Here, get to know Cori’s mother and father, Patti and Don Close.
Cori’s dad, Don:
Cori’s father, Don, was a former faculty soccer participant who went on to coach sports activities at Milpitas High School within the San Francisco Bay Area. I’ve additionally taught health and psychology over a three-decade teaching career.
“When I play up at Stanford every year, several people from my youth soccer team come,” Close advised USA Today. “And they don’t come because we won a lot of soccer games. They come because my dad had a program and not a team. My dad taught lessons and made them feel loved unconditionally. And, to this day, still come back. In fact, two of them spoke at my dad’s memorial service.” Don handed away in 2021 at his dwelling in Chatsworth, California after battling vascular dementia.
Cori’s mother, Patti:
Known to the staff as “Mother Bruin,” Cori’s mom, Patti, is a fixture at UCLA girls’s basketball video games. Since Cori took the UCLA job in 2011, Patti has traveled with the staff to Europe and Africa. “I never even had a passport,” she advised the Associated Press. “It’s a dream. I love the kids. I always joke that I fall in love with them and they have the nerve to leave and graduate. How dare they.”
Her involvement with this system deepened after the loss of life of her husband, Don, in 2021, with whom she had attended video games collectively for 53 years of marriage. “That’s a gift to me, for our team to be so kind to my mom, to give purpose for my mom,” Cori mentioned.
At age 80, Patti drives herself to video games, arriving an hour earlier than typoff, and can go to the interview room after the ultimate buzzer for the postgame recaps. She additionally exhibits up early for recruit dinners at Cori’s dwelling and makes her pitch to incoming gamers’ households. Patti will usually keep at Cori’s home on sport nights moderately than making the 30-minute drive again to her dwelling within the San Fernando Valley. After video games, the 2 share what Cori calls “afterglow,” throughout which Cori pours a glass of wine whereas Patti evaluations the field rating and rehashes the postgame media session. “I usually joke that I’m placating her,” Cori mentioned, “but probably if I’m really honest, it’s sort of a safety net for me, too.”
Along with Cori, Don and Patti additionally had daughters Amity and Adell.
Rachel King (she/her) is a information author at Town & Country. Before becoming a member of T&Cshe spent practically a decade as an editor at Fortune. Her work protecting journey and way of life has appeared in Forbes, Observer, Robb Report, Cruise Criticand Cool Huntingamongst others. Originally from San Francisco, she lives in New York along with her spouse, their daughter, and a precocious labradoodle. Follow her on Instagram at .
