UCLA associate head coach Shannon LeBeauf ‘living a calling’ in women’s basketball

SPOKANE, Wash. — UCLA associate head coach Shannon LeBeauf is a unicorn and an outlier.

Next month, LeBeauf, 49, will celebrate her 14th season as a part of head coach Cori Close’s staff at UCLA. In that time, she has helped build the No. 1 ranked Bruins into a national power, though her role has been as much spiritual as tactical.

“She’s my rock, period,” Close said Saturday before UCLA’s matchup against LSU in the Elite Eight on Sunday (ABC, 3 p.m. ET). “She’s had so many opportunities when she could have gotten a head job, could have gotten to another Power Four [school]. If you asked everybody in the country — and I promise you, it would come out who their top five assistant coaches are in the country — she’s on everyone’s list.

“The fact that she has stayed so loyal to our mission and to our program, to our kids, I just couldn’t be more grateful not only just her, her whole family. They are incredible people and we would not be where we are without Coach Shannon’s loyalty.”

In a business where climbing the coaching ladder is an expected pastime, LeBeauf has made peace with her role, potentially as a career assistant. She determined that coaching was not a job but a calling.

A Southern California native, LeBeauf played basketball and volleyball at Cerritos High School just outside of Los Angeles. She accepted a scholarship to play at Iowa where she was a four-year letterwinner.

She graduated from Iowa in 1998 with a degree in journalism. The WNBA began play a year earlier. “I wanted to be a broadcaster, but I realized that it didn’t give me a chance to have the same touch point, that one-on-one relationship, so I got into coaching,” she said.

She began her coaching career at Iowa for a season, then she moved back home to Los Angeles for graduate school and became an assistant at USC from 2000-04.

Then, LeBeauf made the big cross-country career move to Duke. There she coached All-American players and future WNBA stars. She was on the bench when Duke reached the championship game in 2006, and she also helped bring in the No. 2 ranked recruiting class in the country. But it was also at Duke that LeBeauf decided she needed to step away from the coaching game and reconnect with her spiritual roots.

She needed a breather.

“What pushed me out, honestly was I was tired of the grind of coaching, especially as an assistant,” she said Saturday outside the UCLA locker room. “It was all day, every day, you have no life. And I wanted to get married, I was thinking ‘I’m never going to get married at this rate’ So I got into Bible college…

“I vowed never to get back into coaching I wanted to get a full-time ministry.”

Even at the Bible college LeBeauf found that young women, looking for guidance, gravitated to her. “I learned in Bible college that I was meant to mentor young women.”

She also determined that she would do her mentoring through coaching. She wound up meeting her future husband, Sean LeBeauf, through basketball while she was in Ohio. He was a coach, and they met while he was out recruiting.

She eventually re-connected with Close, who was named UCLA head coach in 2011. That same year, Close asked Shannon LeBeauf to come onboard as an assistant coach.

In a career that has spanned 23 years in an industry where climbing the coaching ladder is a given, she has never been a head coach and never really aspired to be one.

She wants to assist.

“I thought I was only going to be here a year or so,” she said. “I didn’t want to come back to L.A. and coach again. I was like, let me help Cori get this off the ground.”

Both of LeBeauf’s grandparents died within a year of her moving back to Los Angeles, one in November 2011, the other in July 2012. “I’m like ‘Hey God, where are we going? What are we doing? ‘He went silent and I’m like ‘Wait. I’m staying here?’

Fourteen years later, LeBeauf has become part of UCLA’s rise to prominence. This year, Close was named United States Basketball Writers Association National Coach of the Year and UCLA, behind All-American center Lauren Betts, is the nation’s top-rated women’s team.

“I was drawn back into coaching; it’s what I know,” said LeBeauf.

Coaching is still tough, but she has a purpose beyond X’s and O’s.

“It’s still a grind,” she said. “It’s a kind of bittersweet, like this love/hate thing we have sometimes with a sport you’ve been around for so long. But I know that I make a difference in young women’s lives.

“I think it’s purpose. Have I had opportunities to leave and to be an assistant and to make tons of money? Absolutely. Have I had opportunities to become a head coach? Absolutely. But there’s something about being called. If I’m going to be called to go somewhere else, I’ve got to feel released from here. There’s still work to be done and I think seeing us get to this point, this is what we’ve been working towards.”

LeBeauf and Close have known each other for more than 25 years.

“She has great vision. We have true alignment,” LeBeauf said. “In terms of why we do things, we don’t coach, we’re living a calling. It’s different when you work that way and you want to achieve success based on your faith and how you want to do things. There’s something special there.”

Is LeBeauf a UCLA lifer?

“If it’s time to leave, I will,” she said. “But right now it feels right.”