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