UCLA royalty of all eras has adorned the seats of Pauley Pavilion throughout the women’s basketball team’s regular season and NCAA Tournament run.
Basketball alumni like Jordin Canada, Earl Watson and Nina and Russell Westbrook have come out. Alyssia Brewer, Darxia Morris, Debbie Willie Haliday. Softball coach Kelly Inouye-Perez and countless current student-athletes. The list goes on.
But one Bruin has come into the fold to unexpectedly impact the women’s basketball team this season: former UCLA gymnastics coach Valorie Kondos Field, known to most as Miss Val.
“She knows how to bring the best out of every single person that she teaches or every single person that she’s around,” senior guard Charisma Osborne said.
Kondos is ingrained in UCLA history after winning seven national championships but hadn’t kept up with women’s basketball since she retired from coaching at the school in 2019.
She was re-introduced to the program when Osborne and guard Camryn Brown showed up in her Philosophy of Coaching and Leadership class.
The two Bruins are part of the Transformational Coaching and Leadership masters program, which is part of UCLA’s graduate school of education. Kondos co-teaches her class with a philosophy professor.
“Anything of truth in leadership and motivating human beings, there’s nothing new,” Kondos said. “Whenever we bring something up that Coach Wooden said or Pat Summit said or Pete Carroll said, the philosophy professor can go back to the philosopher Socrates and Plato and Zeno and say, ‘Yeah, they said the same thing.’”
The class is largely discussion-based, which draws on Kondos’ coaching techniques. She would host what became known as “great debates” between gymnasts the night before a meet, presenting absurd prompts like: Why should UCLA become a nudist campus?
The gymnasts would deliver a one-minute, 30-second speech arguing for or against the prompt and be judged on content, presentation and eye contact.
Philosophy of Coaching and Leadership takes a similar approach, although the discussions are centered around leadership. In one class, Brown and softball player Maya Brady volleyed back and forth as to whether trust is earned or given.
Kondos said Brown, who is a poised athlete and speaker, shined. Brown embraced the class so much that she asked coach Cori Close if Kondos could speak to the team the morning of Selection Sunday.
“To motivate our team and get us to remember how to play in confidence and how to play in freedom,” Brown said, “because I think she did that so well when she was a coach here. She’s just done that so well in life and motivating so many other people.”
Kondos told the players how she led the gymnastics program to success despite never having done gymnastics herself. She spoke of how she strived to develop her gymnasts into champions in their own right and how that led to success in competition.
She also taught the basketball team dance choreography – with varying results. Some players mimicked the movements with ease and others struggled to find their rhythm. A few playfully wanted to know if they were better dancers than the softball team.
Brown separated her team into two lines and kept windows between people so they could see Kondos delivering the instructions. It was unified chaos.
“It was hysterical,” Kondos said. “They had enthusiasm to learn. And they were in it. They were not embarrassed. They were team bonding, they were having fun, they were helping each other out.”
Osborne said she could still do the choreography weeks later, at least if she heard the music. She was affected by Kondos on an individual level and was one of the students who groaned when Kondos told her class they couldn’t have their back toward anyone while speaking and that eye contact must be maintained.
The class’ final exam required students to deliver a speech about the values of their own coaching philosophy. Brown volunteered to go first and confidently spilled forth words about safety, comfort and service, then picked Osborne to go next. Nervous, she remembered a lesson from Miss Val:
“You don’t have to be anybody else,” Osborne said. “Just be yourself and that’s more than enough. Even in class, she pushes me out of my comfort zone. She was like, ‘It’s OK to be uncomfortable, but just be yourself in that.’”
“I just knew that with the experience that we had from that previous season, this season we’d be able to go all the way.”@CharismaOsborne believes this NCAA tournament run could be historic for @UCLAWBB pic.twitter.com/WtBHJheykj
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) March 28, 2024
Osborne was a guest on ESPN’s SportsCenter for a solo interview Wednesday and talked with ease about her decision to stay for her final season at UCLA, striving to reach the Final Four and how Close danced to a Drake song while recruiting her – a full-circle moment choreographed to perfection.
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That’s one more thread added to the tightly woven fabric among UCLA student-athletes, coaches and alumni that has brought so many out to women’s basketball games.
“Probably one of my favorite things about being a coach at UCLA is the family,” Close said. “If you represent the four letters across your chest, you are family for life. It’s an honor to see those people and it’s an honor to play for them.”