Cori Close began her first press conference en route to the Final Four with a clarification.
The UCLA Bruins coach had seen her team described as the first in program history to make it this far in the tournament. And it was, in fact, the first UCLA women’s team ever to reach the NCAA Final Four. But there was a bit of history lost in the space between those sentences.
“It’s actually not correct,” Close said of the idea that UCLA had never been to the women’s Final Four. “1978, AIAW, they won the national championship.”
Before women’s college sports were overseen by the NCAA, they were under the purview of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, or the AIAW. The organization ran championships for women for a decade before the NCAA took over in 1982. Its history is absent from the records maintained by the NCAA. But it still matters very much to a program like UCLA, whose only championship experience came in that period, and to a coach like Close, who has brought in the alumnae from those years to share in what she has built in Westwood.
There are just two jerseys retired in women’s basketball at UCLA. Both were members of that 1978 AIAW Championship team: Denise Curry, who remains the leading scorer in program history, and Ann Meyers, the first woman to attend UCLA on a full athletic scholarship and a four-time All-American. Both still have season tickets now. “I get a text from them almost before every game,” Close said after the Elite Eight. When she was cutting down the nets an hour earlier, Curry was on the floor with her, watching the program achieve something it had not since her own playing days.
And that 1978 AIAW Championship meant something beyond the campus of UCLA. It marked a major turning point for the sport. That was the first year the women’s tournament was played across multiple weekends. It was the first championship to be shown on national television. It was the first title game played between major state universities (UCLA and Maryland). It set a record for attendance. More than any of those other early championships, 1978 was the first to show the potential for a legitimate audience in women’s basketball.
“You half expected a voice to come over the Pauley Pavilion P.A. system proclaiming, ‘Women’s basketball…now arriving from obscurity on track seven, upper concourse,’” wrote of that championship game. “And, in truth, last Saturday night it happened. In front of the largest crowd ever to see a women’s championship game, women’s basketball came whistling into the station.”
That was a product of what that UCLA team did on the floor, led by Meyers, Curry and guard Anita Ortega. It was also a product of ambition in the athletic department behind them. The structural changes to the championship that year had been spearheaded by UCLA women’s athletic director Judie Holland. Her work laid the foundation for the modern women’s Final Four.
“It was rough, and it was kind of raw, but it was a beginning,” Holland says. “And that’s what I wanted to have happen.”
