Coach sees beyond team’s slow start
By Daily Bruin Staff
Dec. 10, 2000 9:00 p.m.
 NICOLE MILLER/ Daily Bruin Women’s basketball head coach
Kathy Olivier is not swayed by the team’s slow
start this season.
By Scott Schultz
Daily Bruin Contributor
UCLA women’s head basketball coach Kathy Olivier has seen
it all as a coach. Last year, she became only the second
women’s basketball coach in UCLA history to win more than 100
games.
As an assistant at USC, she part of their national championship
team, which ranks among the best college teams ever.
When she took over the reigns from the legendary Billie Moore
after the 1992-93 season, Olivier gradually turned a Bruin program
which was hovering below .500 into a top-10 team.
So now that the team is riding a six-game losing streak to open
the season, is she panicking? Not a chance.
Listening to Olivier, one becomes absorbed by her positive
demeanor.
“There’s a lot of pluses, even though we
haven’t won yet this year,” Olivier said. “This
year it’s a different team where everyone is still learning
what they can bring to the team. The chemistry is good, so there is
a lot of positive.”
The women’s basketball team has been a fractured puzzle
this season. At the end of last season, they watched four of their
five starters from that season’s Elite Eight team graduate.
Before this season, the Bruins learned they would start their
2000-01 campaign without All-Pac-10 senior guard LaCresha
Flannigan, who was academically ineligible, and All-Pac-10
sophomore point guard Nicole Kaczmarski, who did not enroll in the
fall while recovering from an injury.
The Bruins, who exist within a fish bowl existence on this
basketball-crazy campus, were forced to play the hand they were
dealt. Bench players have started, and redshirt candidates have
been playing significant minutes.
With their difficult schedule, the Bruins have gotten off to the
slowest start in the program’s history.
Yet the team has, from the very beginning of the season,
maintained a positive outlook even in these bleakest of times.
The players credit Olivier with keeping their focus on improving
their game, and not dwelling on failures.
“One of the great things about coach Olivier is
she’s always positive, especially this year,” said
junior guard Michelle Greco. “She’s not the type who
points fingers when things go wrong.”
Olivier credits her composure to lessons she learned during her
first seasons as head coach.
“When you look at my first two years, we didn’t have
great talent, but we had really good people,” she said.
“They worked really hard even when they weren’t winning
or (were) down by a lot of points. That’s the base that you
build your program from.”
Olivier sees similarities between those teams and this
year’s team.
“We don’t have a lot of All-Americans on the team
this season, but we have hard-working players who want to improve,
and that’s important,” she said.
The players appreciate her approachable enthusiastic nature.
“She’s very personable.” Greco said. “She
has an open-door policy so we know we can come in whenever we have
any problems. We know we won’t just see her at
practice.”
“People ask me, “˜Don’t I feel a lot of
pressure being at UCLA?'” Oliver said. “I tell
them that’s the way I am anyway. No matter where I am,
I’d feel the pressure. That’s what coaching’s
about. You want to succeed, and you want your players to get
better. That’s something we’re stressing every day in
practice.”
