UCLA Wins First NCAA Women’s Basketball Title And Adds Another Woman Head Coach Champion

Head Coach Cori Close cut down the nets tonight in the 2026 NCAA Women’s Basketball championship game, defeating Dawn Staley’s South Carolina Gamecocks 79-51 in a title matchup that featured two women head coaches. It was a good night for women’s basketball. It was also, if you look at the data, an expected one.

Since the first NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament in 1982, women head coaches have won 30 of the 44 DI national championships. That represents 68 percent of all NCAA titles ever awarded in this sport at the Division 1 level of play. Only three men have ever won, and yet, women currently hold fewer than half (roughly 45%) of the head coaching positions for women’s NCAA programs, a number that has drastically declined since Title IX passed more than 50 years ago. Women have won nearly seven in ten championships in a sport they are increasingly being pushed out of coaching.

Assumption that Men are Natural Leaders

There is a deeply embedded belief in sport, and in most men-dominated industries, that men are the natural fit for leadership positions. This assumption shows up in hiring decisions, salary structures, career trajectories, and the steady erosion of women from positions of sport industry authority over the last five decades. In college sport specifically, the assumption is that roles such as head coach require traits such as being agentic, assertive, competitive, and dominant. Ultimately, those are all traits often associated with men.

But, in women’s college basketball, the data tells a different story of leadership ability and success. Before Title IX, women held over 90 percent of head coaching positions for women’s teams. While Title IX had the power to open doors to more girls and women participating in sport, as those newly added women’s programs gained funding, visibility, and legitimacy, men began moving in. The more valuable and prestigious the job became, the less likely a woman was to be hired into it.

Dismantling the Stereotypes

Only three men have ever won an NCAA Division I women’s basketball title. Geno Auriemma has won 12 at UConn, a record in the sport. Leon Barmore won one at Louisiana Tech in 1988 and Gary Blair won one at Texas A&M in 2011. That is the complete list. The other 30 championships belong to women.

• Pat Summitt won eight at Tennessee
• Kim Mulkey has won four, winning at Baylor and then at LSU
• Tara VanDerveer won three at Stanford across three different decades
• Dawn Staley has won three at South Carolina
• Muffet McGraw won two at Notre Dame
• Linda Sharp won back to back at USC in 1983 and 1984
• Sonja Hogg won the very first championship at Louisiana Tech in 1982
• Marianne Stanley won in 1985 with Old Dominion
• Jody Conradt won in 1986 with Texas
• Marsha Sharp won in 1993 with Texas Tech
• Sylvia Hatchell won in 1994 with North Carolina
• Carolyn Peck won in 1999 with Purdue
• Brenda Frese won in 2006 with Maryland

Since 2017, eight of nine national championships have been won by women head coaches. Five of the last six championship games, excluding the COVID cancellation, featured two women coaches on the sideline. Tonight, Close and Staley faced each other for the title while the men in the Final Four went home.

What the Research Confirms

The assumption that men make better coaches is also contradicted by recent research. A 2018 study examined whether head coach gender impacted individual player performance across 19 WNBA seasons and three seasons of NCAA Division I Women’s Basketball, more than 4,000 player observations in total. After controlling for age, games played, teammate productivity, position, and program expenditures, results indicated that coach gender did not significantly predict individual player productivity in either league.

Men head coaches are not developing players more effectively than women head coaches are. The performance advantage that is assumed to exist for men leaders, the same one that has quietly justified decades of hiring men over women, does not appear in the data. What does appear is a preference toward men in leadership positions that is largely rooted in stereotypes rather than any measurable outcomes.

UCLA and Cori Close

Coach Close spent 15 seasons building UCLA into a national championship program. UCLA held South Carolina to 26 percent shooting, outscored them 25 to 9 in the third quarter alone, the largest single-quarter margin in NCAA championship game history, and every point in the final was scored by a senior. Lauren Betts was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player and Gabriela Jaquez added 21 points and 10 rebounds.

When it was over, Close fought back tears. “It’s immeasurably more than I could ask or imagine,” she told ESPN. “It’s beyond my wildest dreams. It’s meaningful because of the people I’ve gotten to share it with.”

Her championship adds to a long lineage of women head coaches who were told by society that they were not inherently built for the highest levels of leadership in sport. The assumption is that men hold these head coaching roles because they are better at them, but 30 women’s basketball championships won by women indicates otherwise and Coach Close is an incredible addition to this history of dominance for women head coaches in the sport.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com