In This NCAA Tournament, Lauren Betts Has Been More Than Enough
The UCLA center has been one of college basketball’s most dominant players. But finding her confidence wasn’t easy.In This NCAA Tournament, Lauren Betts Has Been More Than Enough
The UCLA center has been one of college basketball’s most dominant players. But finding her confidence wasn’t easy.
Lauren Betts lingered in the tunnel, long after the game ended. She was deeply disappointed with herself. Her performance. It was early March. Betts’s UCLA Bruins had just lost to rival USC on their home court, 80-67, in the final game of the regular season, in front of 13,659 fans who were eager to see a showdown between two top-five teams with two national player of the year candidates in Betts and USC’s JuJu Watkins. But UCLA seemed a step behind the entire game, hardly resembling the team that was at one point ranked no. 1 in the country. The Trojans played with more energy, more physicality, more enthusiasm—and were the mentally tougher team.
It was an ugly gut-punch of a loss for UCLA—the kind that reverberates long after the buzzer. The kind that makes a team take its collective pulse to see what’s really inside.
Every Bruin struggled that night as the Trojans completed a regular-season sweep, but Betts felt as if she alone had let her teammates and coaches down. “I was really mad about how I played and how I showed up,” Betts told The Ringer. The 6-foot-7 junior center struggled to get into a rhythm offensively. Several times she was called for traveling. She scored just 11 points and didn’t register a single block. Her thoughts spiraled as she stood in that tunnel, and she couldn’t stop berating herself. Her mother, Michelle Betts, tried to comfort her later that night, but Lauren was inconsolable. “There were a lot of tears,” Michelle says.
In the postgame press conference, UCLA coach Cori Close made it clear that this was no ordinary loss, but a potentially consequential one. With every pointed comment in front of dozens of hushed reporters and television cameras, she seemed to be issuing a challenge to her players ahead of the postseason. “A choice and a commitment need to be made,” Close said that night. “If you haven’t been humbled by this experience, the pain of where you are has to be greater than the pain it will take to change. You want the pain of discipline or the pain of regret?”
“This is the way this train is going,” she said, “and if you don’t think you can make changes to be on it, tell us now.”
Close’s words were intended for all of her players, but Betts, who was curiously not made available to the media, clearly heard her coach. “I'm never letting that happen again,” Betts recalled telling herself. “This is my opportunity to show my teammates I’m going to come back from this.”
Early the next morning, the Bruins held a players-only meeting and film session. They critiqued each other. They each said their piece. And then they banded together to start anew. The meeting was sobering—yet invigorating. It turned out to be exactly the jolt the team needed.
Eight days later, the Bruins faced USC for a third time—now with the Big Ten title and a chance for revenge on the line. Betts put the team on her back, helping erase a 13-point deficit to beat the Trojans, 72-67, for ultimate redemption. The win gave UCLA its first conference tournament championship since 2006 as the team surpassed 30 wins in a season for the first time in program history. “We got our moxie back,” Close said in a recent interview with The Ringer. So did Betts, who finished with 17 points, five rebounds, four steals, four blocks, and two assists.
And she was just getting started. Throughout the Bruins’ run to the Final Four, Betts has shown what she was made of—and proved that she is undoubtedly one of the best players in the country. On Wednesday, she was named Naismith Defensive Player of the Year. She’s averaging 23 points, 9.3 rebounds, 3.5 blocks, and nearly one steal per game thus far in the NCAA tournament. She was especially dominant in a Sweet 16 win over Ole Miss, scoring 31 points with 10 rebounds, completely owning the paint, drop-stepping and spinning and scoring wherever she pleased.
The Bruins (34-2 overall) earned a Final Four berth for the first time in program history on Sunday after defeating LSU 72-65 in the Elite Eight. Betts finished with 17 points, seven rebounds, and a monster six blocks.
“I can’t remember in the women’s game, a center that had her kind of mobility, IQ, offensive skill set, and defensive prowess all put together,” Close told The Ringer. “There’s no one like her.”
The program’s first Associated Press first-team All-American, Betts impacts the game on both sides of the court. It’s the way she blocks shots. Alters shots. Makes her opponents think twice before even attempting to go in the paint. She set UCLA’s single-game blocks record with nine against Baylor earlier this season.
Defensively, she can switch onto positions 1 through 5, and on offense, she has a sweet 17-foot jump shot and an ease when handling the ball that is rare for a player of her size.
But that second USC loss, according to Betts and her coaches, was the turning point of the season—one that has catapulted the Bruins all the way to the Final Four. The Bruins will play UConn and star point guard Paige Bueckers on Friday in the national semifinals. Defending national champion South Carolina will face Texas in the other semifinal.
Betts’s intensity has been unmatched. During the Elite Eight win over LSU, she swatted away shots on back-to-back possessions, after which she held up two fingers and gave a cold-blooded stare as if to say, I’m here. And I’m not going anywhere.
The Bruins’ journey to the Final Four, especially that pivotal loss to USC, is a metaphor for Betts and her own journey. She’s had to be resilient—had to come back from many obstacles, especially those she built from within. She’s struggled with self-doubt and perfectionism and feeling like she wasn’t enough.
“Every young person has to find what their roadblocks are, and hers has been confidence,” Close says. “Hers has been being too hard on herself and not believing how worthy she is.”
Betts’s collegiate career hadn’t gone the way she had envisioned. She was the nation’s top recruit out of Grandview High in Aurora, Colorado, when she joined Stanford for the 2022-23 season. She averaged just under 10 minutes per game as a freshman, unable to find her niche on Tara VanDerveer’s team, and her confidence plummeted. She transferred to UCLA after just one season in Palo Alto, and while she shined on the court in her first year at UCLA, seemingly buoyed by her coaches and teammates’ faith in her, she was still contending with what worthiness, what enoughness, meant to her.
Last season, she wrote “You are enough” on her sneakers. Now, playing the best ball of her life and two wins away from the NCAA’s biggest prize, she doesn’t feel the need to write those words anymore. All that she has been through has prepared her for this moment.
“I’m just playing a lot lighter,” Betts says. “I feel a lot more free.”
Early last week, as the Bruins prepared for their Sweet 16 matchup against Ole Miss, Betts could be heard all the way across UCLA’s practice court. “Left! Left! Left!” she shouted on defense, warning a teammate about an incoming screen. Betts hedged just enough to intimidate the ball handler, who fumbled the ball as it sailed out of bounds.
“YEAH!!!” Betts screamed, hyping up her teammates. That was the kind of energy Close sought when she challenged her team after that USC loss last month. At the end of practice, she huddled her players at half court. “When you lock in and play with that urgency,” Close told the team, “you are the best team in the country! Clear? Embrace it!”
It’s an urgency that the Bruins have been feeling since the season began, before anyone predicted that UCLA, which began 2024-25 ranked second in its own conference, would reach the Final Four. “People have been underestimating us,” says Bruins forward Timea Gardiner, one of the heroes of the Elite Eight victory, where she scored 15 points in 22 minutes off the bench.
She can relate to Betts better than anyone. They’re roommates, both transfers. Their fathers are coincidentally both named Andy, and were teammates on the British national team. “She got to find her way again,” Gardiner says of Betts. “She had a lot of hype out of high school, and coming into college, it doesn’t go how you plan, and so then you have to fight that adversity. And then you come to a program, and you have to fight to find that belief and confidence again in yourself, and it’s really, really hard.”
I can’t remember in the women’s game, a center that had her kind of mobility, IQ, offensive skill set, and defensive prowess all put together. There’s no one like her.Cori Close
Betts finished a series of drop steps and turnaround shots after practice, making sure each move was crisp, each follow-through held max extension. She walked to the side of the court and took a beat. Resting her hands on a table in front of her, she revealed cheetah-tipped nails. She likes to switch up the design for games. Then she explained the inspiration behind the tattoos that travel along her arms:
Dolce far niente: “The pleasure of doing nothing,” she says. “Enjoying life as it is.”
222: “Right place, right time. Be where your feet are”
Still I Rise: the title of the famous Maya Angelou poem. “My mom would send it to me in high school all the time,” she says.
LOOK AT THE FLOWERS: in small capital letters, next to tattooed flowers that curve around the fingers on her right hand. It’s a phrase her mother says to remind her to stay present. “Making sure that I’m finding joy in every single day,” Betts says.
Betts’s newfound joy is obvious. “The joy of, I want to be in the gym, I want to work, I want to get better,’” she says. “That’s not something I felt in a while.”
Betts remembers when her need to be perfect began. “High school,” she says. That’s when national rankings surfaced. The spotlight was on her even as a freshman, as she grew to her current height of 6-foot-7 and was already the top-ranked player in her class. She quickly developed a sort of double-vision, aware when others were staring at her. She towered over classmates, and strangers would approach her to ask: “How tall are you?” People even gawked at her during team meals at restaurants, her high school coach, Josh Ulitzky, says.
Sometimes, the comments were too much to bear. “Our first or second day of orientation, we had to get her out of the bathroom because she was crying,” Ulizky says. “She was just trying to fit in, just trying to please.” Betts found it was difficult navigating life online, too, seeing negative comments on social media as her on-court stature grew. “It was extremely hard,” Betts says. “I don’t think I was ready for how fast everything was going to happen.”
She began to hold herself to an unattainable standard, chastising herself if she wasn’t a perfect 10 at all times. “Extremely high,” Betts says, “and not good for me.”
But basketball wasn’t always something meant for perfection. She began playing at 9 years old, and back then the sport was something to simply enjoy. She was born in Spain, as her father was playing professional basketball there. “I wanted to be like him growing up,” Lauren says. She enjoyed going to his games with her younger sister Sienna, a high school senior who earlier this week was named MVP of the McDonald’s All-American game and will attend UCLA to play with Lauren next season. “Her and Sienna, they used to be in the front row dancing around with the cheerleaders and mascots anytime there was music on,” Andy says. “They definitely grew up understanding and seeing basketball.” They also had fun hanging out with friends, too, and enjoying their mother’s cooking, especially paella, Lauren’s favorite.
The family moved to the U.S. when Betts was 8. Even then, she was taller than most of her teammates and opponents. As she entered middle school, she began working with ex-NBA player Ervin Johnson (not that Earvin Johnson) on the fundamentals. The two worked for hours on footwork in the post. By high school, as she sprouted to 6-foot-7, she was unstoppable. But it wasn’t easy, grappling with the expectations that came with her stature.
Being tall is a double-edged sword in the sport; when a player succeeds, some say it’s only because of one’s height. But when one fails, suddenly the failure is magnified: one shouldn’t possibly fail at that height. Even as a young girl, Betts subconsciously understood mixed messages. She had to be physically dominant, agile, and expansive, as well as take up less space.
She couldn’t win.
“Don’t dribble too much!” her mother recalled some coaches saying. “Don’t take too much time to make passes!”
Still, she wreaked havoc on the offensive and defensive end as she morphed into a star for Grandview, where she was named WBCA High School Player of the Year in 2022 and twice named Colorado’s Gatorade Player of the Year (2021, 2022).
But underneath the praise was fear. A deep-seated belief that she was underperforming. She worried about what others were thinking of her, online and offline. The rankings, the expectations, only made things worse. Even when she finished with a marvelous stat line, she still didn’t feel she performed “good enough,” Ultizky says.
Those feelings only intensified when she arrived at Stanford and was largely limited to a bench role as a freshman. It was a difficult adjustment. While she says she developed friendships with many players on the team, she didn’t feel a connection with or much support from her coaches. Reading Angelou’s “Still I Rise” helped, a reminder to herself: “You’re going to be OK.” She knew she had to transfer.
UCLA, which had recruited her out of high school, seemed like the right fit. Michelle Betts says the family admired Close’s coaching style. To them, Close seemed passionate and understanding, and they believed Lauren needed that kind of support from her next program. But even as she’d made the decision to move, mentally it was hard to let her freshman season go. “Scars from Stanford,” Andy says.
She was trapped in her own doubts, wondering if she was capable of developing into the player experts predicted she’d be.
UCLA’s coaches were aware of those scars. When Betts first arrived in Westwood, assistant coach Shannon LeBeauf asked her if she truly wanted to play. LeBeauf says she never doubted that Betts did, but wanted to remind Betts that showing up was a choice. Her choice. She sensed that Betts had to learn to tune out outside noise and play because she loved it—not because of anyone else’s expectations.
“If you want to walk away from it,” LeBeauf said, “walk away from it.”
Betts told her coach that she was all in. And as the 2023-24 season began, she proved to be more than capable. She was brilliant in the post, able to finish with both hands and move through the offense with ease. On defense, she seemingly blocked anyone that came inside.
Still, it was an adjustment, going from benchwarmer at Stanford to starter at UCLA. She was suddenly earning conference Player of the Week honors and gaining attention from the media, but she still couldn’t see herself the way they saw her—as a player bursting with talent and potential. External expectations rose, and with it came the painful, familiar feeling of not-enoughness.
“I just couldn’t accept what was happening,” Betts says. “I just didn’t really grasp, I am a really good player on a really good team, because I continued to see myself as a freshman at Stanford,” Betts says. So she put pressure on herself to perform—to prove that she belonged.
“I wanted to be perfect,” Betts says, “and make a statement.”
But there was no middle ground. She found herself in an all-or-nothing mindset: either she was perfect or she was failing, even when she was leading the team in scoring and rebounding. “It surprised her, and me,” Close admits now, “that she got as good and as dominant as quickly as she did and I think the expectations were higher than the habits, and the expectations were higher than the inner peace.
“Because of that,” Close says, “it was shaky ground, and that's why it crumbled.”
Close noticed how Betts’s confidence seemed to be slipping away throughout last season. She scored just 10 points each in back-to-back games in early January against Oregon State and USC—hardly a slump, but she couldn’t shake the negative thoughts about letting her teammates and coaches down, thoughts that ran through her mind on a loop. Betts would become withdrawn if she made a mistake. “When stuff hit the fan, she would go into herself and go on an island,” Close says. Betts considers herself to be her team’s no. 1 cheerleader, and she’s happier for another teammate’s success than she is for her own. So fearing that she’d let them down in anything was sometimes too much to bear.
No, you are That Girl. There’s a false narrative. What’s going on in your head is a lie. I promise you it’s a lie.Shannon LeBeauf
“I was so worried about the wrong things,” Betts says, “and I think it had a lot to do with things that weren’t really in my control. And I think once I let that take over my mental state, it just kind of showed in how I played. I feel like I just played a lot more timid.” The coaching staff reminded her that she wasn’t letting anyone down. LeBeauf knew that Betts’s journey was going to be more complex than simply helping her develop the on-court skills necessary to be an elite player. Betts needed to build confidence and block out negativity and stop comparing herself to others.
“You’re a unicorn,” LeBeauf would remind her. “They don’t make them like you.”
When Betts would downplay her achievements, LeBeauf would remind her: “No, you are That Girl.” Her success wasn’t a fluke. “There’s a false narrative,” LeBeauf would tell her. “What’s going on in your head is a lie. I promise you it’s a lie.”
Perfectionism, Betts was learning, was a trap. It kept her small, kept her fearful. UCLA’s coaches often recited a mantra to the team: “You can’t outperform your self-image.” Meaning, one’s foundation, one’s authentic self-belief, has to be established before earning any kind of success.
Betts knew she had to work to replace her negative thoughts with more positive ones, but she felt she couldn’t continue to push. It was the lowest she had ever felt. “I would just bottle it up and I would stay by myself, and I wouldn’t get myself to break out of that mindset,” Betts says.
She stepped away from the team in January 2024, checking into a hospital to work on her mental health. “She was admitted to the hospital for severe depression,” Michelle says. “I flew out there on the day she was admitted. Coach Cori picked me up from the airport and took me directly to the hospital to see her.”
Lauren began therapy to help her process her negative thoughts.
“She just needed some time away from basketball,” Andy says.
Her teammates and coaches supported Betts during her time away, encouraging her to take however long she needed. “Every single one of her teammates and coaches visited her in the hospital,” Michelle says.
“Then, she was released into my care,” Michelle says. “I stayed with her for a week while the team was traveling.”
“I knew she’d return,” LeBeauf says. “But she had to redefine it on her own terms.” Betts had to learn that she could still thrive when things weren’t perfect. When she wasn’t perfect.
Buoyed by the faith her coaches and teammates had in her, Betts finally felt ready to return to play 18 days later. She didn’t feel shame admitting that she needed time for herself. “She can show them all of her emotions. She can show them vulnerability, and it’s OK,” Michelle says. “She can have self-doubt—and they work with her.”
“Being able to be herself—and completely herself—with that group of coaches, I think has been a game changer for her.”
Her coaches were telling her she was safe and that she was loved unconditionally, and Betts began to trust it. Whether she scored three points or 30 points, Lauren knew she had to feel worthy regardless of her performance. She continued to attend therapy. “It’s been very helpful,” Michelle says.
She had learned to let go of mistakes quicker, instead of letting them spiral into something bigger in her mind. “Simple fix,” LeBeauf would remind her. “Everything has a simple fix.” But the coaches didn’t just offer support, they also listened. Close asked Betts deep questions: “What does inner peace mean to you? What is your source? How do we get there? What fills your cup? What does self-care mean to you?” They worked together to navigate the answers, but Betts had to look within—look at the painful parts, the scary parts, and not look away.
“Most of us aren’t willing to do that work,” Close says.
You can’t outperform your self-image. Her coaches continued to remind her of this mantra. And as her self-image began to improve, so did her play. UCLA advanced to the Sweet 16 of the 2024 NCAA tournament before falling to LSU. Betts had 14 points, 17 rebounds, and four blocks in that game.
As Betts began writing “You are enough” on her sneakers last season, she began to realize she couldn’t base her entire identity on basketball. She was more than a basketball player. “I’m a daughter, I’m a sister, I’m a friend, I’m a teammate, I’m a granddaughter.”
“I’m a student at UCLA,” she says.
Last spring, she experienced further epiphanies. “It was just nice for me to have a break from basketball and to just go through therapy, understand who I am as a person outside of basketball, and so I think I just kind of finally came to a conclusion: ‘What you were telling yourself [the negative thoughts] … obviously did you no good and you have to be better for yourself.’”
What did enoughness truly mean? What did it truly feel like to feel it in her bones? She continued to wrestle with her thoughts, her ambitions. Her conception of herself. And the more she probed, the more she realized: enoughness isn’t something one has to earn. Get right. Get perfect. Enoughness isn’t wrapped in a gold star or all-conference honors, either.
It’s already in her.
When Betts began practices ahead of this season, she says she felt fully present. Far less worried about what others thought about her, and more focused on being the leader her coaches and teammates needed her to be.
UCLA defeated then–no. 1 South Carolina in late November, 77-62. There was a moment in that game when Gardiner dished Betts a high-low pass. After Betts converted the bucket, she smiled and gave her teammate a smirk. They both sensed that the momentum had shifted. “Oh, we got it in the bag,” Gardiner remembers thinking. “Yeah. This is our game.” That win sent a message to the rest of the country: UCLA was for real.
It was a chance to show how much Betts’s game had improved, too, as she had worked on her decision-making and on slowing down in the post—not rushing as much when she started seeing a double-team. Most importantly, she felt lighter. Happier.
But she didn’t magically transform into another person. There is no potion that has erased all her self-doubt. She’s human. Flawed. She has to constantly work to re-wire her thoughts. “I think it’s going to be a lifelong journey for her,” Michelle says. “But it’s something that’s been improving year after year, and this is the most confident that I’ve ever seen her.”
Before each game this season, Betts writes affirmations on the scouting report that each Bruin is given. Things like “You are amazing” … “Be confident” … “You got this.”
I just kind of finally came to a conclusion: “What you were telling yourself [the negative thoughts] … obviously did you no good and you have to be better for yourself.”Lauren Betts
The growth was clear last weekend in the Elite Eight game against LSU. She could have gotten frustrated after picking up two fouls in the first quarter, and sitting on the bench for all of the second quarter. But she didn’t. She kept calm, and by the fourth quarter, as LSU chipped away at UCLA’s lead, Betts knew it was her time.
Guard Gabriela Jaquez whipped an entry into Betts on the block. She dipped her shoulder into her defender—embracing a no-call—but missed the layup. She quickly snatched her own rebound. Two more defenders swarmed her. It didn’t matter. Betts went up hard to the hoop again, this time finishing and drawing the foul.
“LET’S GO!!!” she screamed, stomping her feet, celebrating before huddling her teammates together.
Shoulders back, chest out—Betts didn’t look like anything like the timid player she had once been. She pumped her fist, and you could see her briefly glance down at her palm, and the flowers inked along her fingers.
A reminder. Joy is always there. She just has to look for it.
