UCLA Wins First NCAA Women's Basketball Title, Routing South Carolina 79-51

The score was 61-32 after three quarters, and still nobody in Phoenix could quite believe it. UCLA's Bruins dismantled the three-time national champion South Carolina Gamecocks on Sunday in a 79-51 rout at the Mortgage Matchup Center to capture the program's first-ever NCAA Women's Basketball Championship, finishing the 2025-26 season 37-1 and ending a 48-year gap since the Bruins last won a women's national title of any kind.

Guard Gabriela Jaquez led UCLA with 21 points, 10 rebounds, and five assists, her brother Jaime Jaquez Jr. of the Miami Heat watching from the stands. Center Lauren Betts, the 6-foot-7 anchor of the Bruins' frontcourt, contributed 16 points, at least 10 rebounds, and three blocks on 6-of-10 shooting before being named the NCAA Tournament's Most Outstanding Player. South Carolina's Tessa Johnson led all Gamecocks scorers with 14 points in what became the second-worst loss in program history.

UCLA never trailed. The Bruins opened with a 21-10 first quarter, stretched the lead to 36-23 by halftime, then buried South Carolina with a 25-9 third-quarter run that stands as the largest single-quarter scoring margin in women's NCAA championship game history. The 28-point final margin was the third-largest in the title game's history. UCLA shot 8-of-19 from three-point range and dominated the paint throughout.

"We've been prepping for this since Sept. 25th," Jaquez said after the final whistle. "That was when our first practice was. And for a long time, we set out for this. I knew we were going to do it." She added: "Crying a lot, the confetti, all of the fans being here to support us, my family being here, it just means everything."

Head coach Cori Close, in her 15th season at UCLA with a 358-144 career record, described the moment simply: "It's immeasurably more than I could ask or imagine. It's beyond my wildest dreams." Close, who worked alongside the legendary John Wooden as a 22-year-old assistant, spent years building this roster around continuity. Six returning seniors formed the core, all five 2025 starters plus forward Angela Dugalic, who came back after last season's 85-51 Final Four blowout at the hands of UConn. On the way to the title, UCLA also beat Texas 51-44 in the Final Four semifinals, avenging their only loss of the season, a November defeat to the Longhorns in a Thanksgiving tournament.

Dawn Staley's South Carolina team finished 36-4 and was seeking a fourth national title overall and its third under Staley, who won in 2017, 2022, and 2024. The Gamecocks were making their sixth straight Final Four appearance and third consecutive title game. Staley remains one of only five coaches in women's basketball history with three or more national championships, joining Geno Auriemma, Pat Summitt, Kim Mulkey, and Tara VanDerveer, and is the only Black head coach in that group.

For UCLA, Sunday's title closes a specific kind of wound. The program last won a women's national championship in 1978 under the AIAW, the predecessor to the NCAA's women's tournament, with Ann Meyers Drysdale and Denise Curry leading that squad. The men's program famously won 10 NCAA titles under Wooden. Now, 48 years later, the women's program has its own.