LOS ANGELES — Inside Tony Newnan’s office in Westwood, the world hangs on pushpins.

They cluster in Europe. They hopscotch across the South Pacific and creep into South America. A dense constellation stretches from Portugal to Croatia, from Sweden to New Zealand. Bangkok’s pin lingers, having spoiled Newnan rotten 8,350 miles from home with a personal tuk-tuk.

It’s a crisp, classroom-style world map at first glance. What disrupts the ordinary are the pins puncturing New South Wales, Jakarta, Helsinki and Athens. Cities that rarely appear in the same sentence are stitched together in pursuit of finding the next Bruin.

Each pin represents a gym Newnan camped out in, a FIBA bleacher he climbed onto or a relationship nurtured. Alongside Newnan’s voyaging and a phone dense with contacts, the pins trace both his footsteps and the origins of UCLA women’s basketball players.

As women’s college basketball globalizes and recruiting moves at warp speed, UCLA is cashing in on a decade-long head start, one that began when head coach Cori Close arrived in Westwood in 2011 and planted a flag for global talent. Now, the No. 2 Bruins, a program built in large part around that talent, are eyeing a return to the Final Four.

“It used to be three or four schools that did it consistently right. And now a lot more people are catching up,” Close said, during a season in which more than 530 NCAA programs have at least one international player. “But we’ve been like, ‘Hey, we want to stay ahead of the curve. We want to stay at the top.’”

Hired a month into Close’s tenure, Newnan became UCLA’s globe-trotter-in-chief, the assistant coach who would help make international recruiting a pillar of UCLA’s success. With 1,496 international players in the sport this year, according to the Sports Roster Data Project at the University of Maryland, Newnan’s early efforts to cultivate worldwide talent have positioned UCLA as one of the most trusted international pipelines in women’s college basketball.

Since Close and Newnan took the reins, UCLA has reeled in 11 overseas recruits — edging out powerhouse programs like UConn (10), LSU (seven), Texas (five) and South Carolina (five).

“The internationals have been a huge part of our building process to become a top-five, championship-level program,” Close said.

And while other schools dip in and out of the international pool, UCLA never dries off. Eight times in 15 seasons, the Bruins have landed overseas recruits, turning what could be a detour for other programs into a well-worn road back to Westwood.

But before Lena Bilić proved Croatians could “come to America and play,” before Sweden’s Christina Karamouzi recoiled from American grocery prices, before New Zealand’s Charlisse Leger-Walker centered her graduate-school capstone project on international student-athletes, there was Newnan — unassuming, measured and “wicked-smart,” as Close put it.

When Bilić, drawn in by Newnan’s knack for making “you feel important,” visited UCLA in 2024, she and her mother watched film of her FIBA games in Newnan’s office.

“I told her, ‘Lena, you’re a great, amazing player, but you’re going to struggle here,” Newnan said. “‘You don’t play hard enough, you’re not aggressive enough, you don’t talk loud enough. These are all the things that we’re going to need to challenge you on.’

“And her mom is just in the front row, going, ‘Yes, yes. Listen to him. That’s exactly right.’ Just having honest communication with them is so important.”

The exchange revealed the recruiting code Newnan swears by: relationships rooted in respect, realism and results.

“I network and treat people kind and treat them how I would want to be treated,” Newnan said. “There’s trust between the people and the friendships I make.”

Every summer, Newnan’s office map blooms — the Bruins coaching staff charting at least 10 expeditions a year from U16 and U17 qualifiers to continental championships to World Cups. Newnan said international players often arrive with a more complete offensive foundation — comfortable with spacing, movement and team concepts — making that side of the game an easy transition.

“I’ve had a lot of international freshmen come in over my six years,” said Leger-Walker, the grad student point guard who Close often praises as a quasi assistant coach. “And not to be biased, but their (basketball) IQ is 10 times higher than a lot of the American freshmen coming in, just because of how they play team basketball.”

Those evaluations pull Newnan across oceans. To Portugal, where he first appreciated Bilić’s spark; to Bangkok, where jet lag blurred into nights while he scouted Germany’s Emily Bessoir and Australia’s Izzy Anstey; to Belarus, where Leger-Walker first entered his orbit.

Ten years ago, looking overseas meant having the court almost entirely to yourself. It’s now more like a gold rush with a thousand prospectors. But UCLA’s early move has paid dividends, establishing a name that attracts overseas talent without the Bruins needing to travel first.

And hence, Newnan’s phone rings both across borders and within the sport’s inner circles. He became a consultant earlier this season, fielding calls from multiple WNBA head coaches eager to crack the code on international evaluation and connections.

“Tony is just steady about building relationships and being trustworthy, being a man of his word, having the knowledge and understanding of who the best players are coming out of Europe,” Close said. “He’s now earned a reputation that he’s the guy in that space, and he’s one of the top three international recruiters in the entire country.”

In much of Europe, where seven of UCLA’s 11 international recruits came from, development runs through club systems rather than schools. Players train year-round in environments that prioritize skill repetition, tactical understanding and team concepts over live-game experience.

Close said European athletes thus master the alphabet of basketball — footwork, spacing, help-side defense. The American pathway, meanwhile, revolves around high school gyms and AAU circuits, prioritizing exposure and individual development.

In smaller countries where the pool of talent and opportunities to play elite basketball are more limited, many top international players jump age groups early or earn caps with their national teams, collecting professional experience long before college.

“When you recruit a player that comes to us, and she’s 18 years old, she’s already played against pros — she’s already played that level of physicality,” Close said. “She’s already been taught to do things away from the ball as well as with the ball.”

For some international prospects, national team access is inviolable. Close said some recruits won’t engage UCLA unless it can synchronize the college season with their federation’s demands. Wearing their country’s colors carries the same weight as wearing UCLA’s, and Close said the program’s responsibility is to ensure coexistence.

Skill, Newnan says, is fluent across borders. Feel for the game? Not always. His real test is whether a player’s instincts — especially on defense — can survive the collisions and chaos of college basketball. Though many international players arrive without the baggage of bad habits, adjusting to a new playbook and pace requires patience.

“Back home, we have like one or two plays, but we didn’t really execute that,” freshman guard Karamouzi said. “Here, we have to know all these plays. I had a hard time remembering everything.”

For someone described as “poker face beyond poker face” due to her stoic demeanor, Bilić had to find her voice fast. At UCLA, she said, silence isn’t an option. Her soft-spoken nature prompts sideline pestering at practice. Assistant coach Tasha Brown warned her last week: “Every time you’re not talking, Lena, you’re coming over here to do planks.”

“We were more chill back home,” Bilić said. “Here, it’s like, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.’ They’re really big on talking, even when you’re just standing in the corner.”

Off the floor, international players often arrive in Westwood with a maturity shaped in pro locker rooms and hardened by the solitude of braving the unknown in a new country, with limited chances to return home.

“The maturity of that age for an international kid is a little bit ahead of some of the American kids,” Newnan said. “That was an element of our cultural diversity, our teamwork that we wanted to have.”

While the European system has its advantages, neither Close nor Newnan romanticizes the international game.

There is nothing akin to the sheer sprawl of the American basketball machine. A nationwide network of schools, AAU programs and colleges — backed by full-time staff and professional-grade infrastructure — props up American basketball in ways the outside world cannot replicate.

“The biggest difference is coming over here and realizing how set most people have been to get to college, especially (Division I), their whole life,” Leger-Walker said. “Whereas back home, it’s kind of more like, ‘Oh, I’ll try it out and see.’

“Cliche, but (the U.S.) is the land of opportunity. The resources that colleges have here, even from a lower level, is just insane. I have never had so much just given to me in my life for basketball. Even just having a nice locker room — that’s crazy. Having food after practice is crazy.”

UCLA embraces a hybrid formula: American speed and opportunity fused with international feel and discipline.

Even the most polished international players feel the whiplash — more hours on the floor, louder gyms and tighter schedules. As Leger-Walker put it, “Your schedule is completely flipped when you come over here. If you’re not ready for that, that wrecks you. … You have to work your ass off, and you’re gonna get beat every day coming in against 23- (and) 24-year-olds.”

That adjustment even became a subject for Leger-Walker’s academic work. The 24-year-old’s graduate capstone project centers on why many international student-athletes choose to return home before they’ve used up their college eligibility — pointing less to basketball than preparation, culture shock and the weight of independence.

Strength training, daily workouts and constant evaluation compounded by academic rigor — which, at UCLA, means meeting the standards of one of the nation’s top public universities — are demands “your body and mind aren’t used to,” Leger-Walker said.

That’s where UCLA makes the landing softer.

Close and Newnan described a program defined by constant touchpoints — weekly one-on-one meetings, small-group dinners and deliberate pairing of international players — designed to recreate the support systems of home.

It’s care rendered in small decisions. While Bilić joined teammates Sienna and Lauren Betts for a winter break trip to their home in Colorado, Karamouzi and Leger-Walker’s parents flew to Los Angeles, and Newnan spent the day with both families at the Lakers’ Christmas Day game. After the team’s flight home from a game at Illinois landed at 1 a.m., Newnan drove Karamouzi and Bilić home, ensuring that unfamiliar streets didn’t feel unsafe.

On UCLA senior forward Timea Gardiner’s birthday, the Bruins sang to her in five languages — a snapshot of a team shaped by several homelands and a common cause.

International recruiting isn’t Plan B for Close and Newnan. It’s Plan A — bolded, underlined and circled in permanent marker.

Back in Newnan’s office, the map stays busy, as he’s answering another phone call and learning bits of another language. Pushpins congregate where there was once pastel barrenness, routes continue to vault oceans. What once looked unconventional now looks prescient. But the map still has room.

“I’m looking forward to finding the next new spot,” Newnan said.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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