After starting Big Ten play with 10 straight losses, Indiana women’s basketball was on a three-game winning streak before it traveled to the West Coast for two contests in Los Angeles.
The Hoosiers dropped their first game to USC on Thursday, ending their streak, and will face another difficult test against No. 2 UCLA, which is 24-1 this season, on Sunday. ESPN Analytics gives UCLA a 98.7% chance of beating Indiana.
Indiana fell to USC 79-73 at the Galen Center. Despite senior guard Shay Ciezki not playing in the contest, the Hoosiers stuck with the Trojans throughout the game, even holding the lead at halftime.
Turnovers and foul trouble caught up with the young Hoosiers, who were without the Big Ten’s leading scorer, but four Indiana players scored in double figures. Freshman forward Maya Makalusky had a career-high 29 points, and junior forward Edessa Noyan recorded 12. Freshman guard Nevaeh Caffey and redshirt sophomore guard Lenée Beaumont notched 11 and 10 points, respectively.
After the loss, Indiana head coach Teri Moren said she didn’t know whether or not Ciezki would be available for the Hoosiers contest against UCLA.
“I'm hopeful that maybe another day or two, you know, she'll be available on Sunday, but we'll see,” Moren said. “It’s just one of those freak things. Nobody was around her; it was just 5 on 0; we were just repping some of our stuff that we were planning on using tonight and she just rolled it and was not available.”
Whether or not Ciezki will be available against UCLA, Indiana will need to replicate its balanced scoring attack against the Bruins, who ranks second in the Big Ten in points per game with 86.
UCLA’s scoring attack is led by senior center Lauren Betts, who averages 16.4 points and 8.2 rebounds per game. Along with Betts, who was the 2024-25 Naismith Women’s Defensive Player of the Year, three other Bruins average double-digit scoring per game.
Senior guard Kiki Rice averages 15.4 points, while senior guard Gabriela Jaquez adds 14.3. Graduate student guard Gianna Kneepkens averages 13.1 points per game.
The Bruins have dominated nearly all of their conference opponents this year. Their average margin of victory against Big Ten opponents is 25.1 points. Most recently, UCLA defeated then-No. 8 Michigan on Feb. 8 by three points in the Bruin’s closest conference game of the season. Then, UCLA beat No. 13 Michigan State 86-63 on Wednesday.
UCLA’s lone loss this season came to then-No. 4 University of Texas at Austin on Nov. 26 at the Players Era Women’s Championship. The Bruins fell to the Longhorns by 11 points but responded the next day with an 89-59 win over Duke University.
UCLA is in its 15th season with head coach Cori Close at the helm. Last season, she led the Bruins to a 34-3 overall record, Big Ten Tournament Championship and an NCAA Tournament Final Four appearance, where UCLA lost to the eventual national champions, the University of Connecticut. Close swept national coach of the year honors after her historic season with the Bruins.
The contest between Indiana and UCLA is set to tipoff at 3 p.m. Sunday at Pauley Pavilion in Los Angeles. The game will stream on Peacock.
Follow reporters Savannah Slone (@savrivers06 and srslone@iu.edu) and Max Schneider (maxschn@iu.edu) and columnist Sean McAvoy (@sean_mc07 and semcavoy@iu.edu) for updates throughout the Indiana women’s basketball season.
