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Lauren Betts makes her Final Four debut on Friday for UCLA women’s basketball.
The 6-foot-7 junior center has been the catalyst behind the Bruins’ storybook season, and now she is tasked with leading UCLA past one of the sports’ biggest blue bloods, UConn, in the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament on Friday at 9:30 p.m. ET at Amalie Arena in Tampa, Florida.
One of the top players in the country, Betts’ physicality and toughness inside the paint has caused difficulty for opponents to figure out a way to stop her throughout March Madness.

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone dominated in her first race of 2025, taking the 400m hurdles on the debut day of the Grand Slam Track series in Kingston, Jamaica.
She clocked 52.76 seconds, distancing runner-up Dalilah Muhammad by 1.83 seconds. McLaughlin-Levrone has now won 23 consecutive 400m hurdles races (including heats) since taking silver at the 2019 World Championships, according to track and field statistics website Tilastopaja.info.
In the last four years, she has broken the world record six times — taking it from 52.16 to 50.37 — and won Olympic gold in Tokyo and Paris.

Former Michigan State forward Xavier Booker wrote Friday that he’s transferring to UCLA, confirming earlier reports with a post on his social media account.
The Spartans expected big things from the 6-foot-11 Booker when he arrived on campus in 2023-24. He was a five-star recruit and a McDonald’s All-American as a senior at Indianapolis Cathedral High School in Indiana.
But Booker didn’t get much of a chance to show what he could do. While he appeared in 60 games, he started only starting five and averaged just 11.3 minutes in two seasons in East Lansing. He averaged 4.

Every single year in the NHL, it seems like there’s one team — occasionally two — that really catches fire through the spring and into the playoffs.
What’s even more fun is when that heater seems to be fueled by some strange event.
Last season, it was the Nashville Predators who shredded through the spring and into the playoffs despite looking like they were finished at the All-Star break. How’d they do it? They canceled their plans to go see U2 at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
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Well, this year’s hot team is the St.

Photo by Tyler McFarland/NCAA Photos via Getty Images
NCAA President Charlie Baker said Friday that it would be “really hard to change” the women’s NCAA Tournament format in the near future.
TAMPA, Fla. — The complaints could not be ignored. From Birmingham, Alabama, to Spokane, Washington, last weekend, some of the most prominent coaches in women’s college basketball took aim at the NCAA’s fairly-new double-regional format.

Photo by Jayce Illman/Getty Images
Setting the stage for qualifying at the Japanese Grand Prix by diving into five big questions facing the grid
A frenetic Friday in Suzuka has set the stage for a fascinating qualifying session at the Japanese Grand Prix.
At the moment, McLaren remain the class of the field. Lando Norris topped the timing sheets in FP1 while his teammate Oscar Piastri was on top in FP2, with Norris right behind him.
With two wins in two grands prix, McLaren enter the week leading the way in the Constructors’ Championship race.

© Mike Cardew / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

After Purdue landed a commitment from former Tennessee State linebacker Sanders Ellis earlier this week, another transfer defender has been added to the Boilermakers’ board of portal targets on Friday.
Ohio defensive tackle transfer Cam Rice shared on X that Purdue was the latest to offer since he hit the portal on Wednesday.

Aaron Judge is off to the hottest start in MLB. (Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images)IMAGN IMAGES via Reuters Connect / Reuters

Aaron Judge is off to a great start. To both the 2025 season and his New York Yankees career.
The reigning AL MVP hit his MLB-best sixth homer of the season and 17th RBI of the season against the Pittsburgh Pirates on Friday, taking reliever Tim Mayza deep to push the Yankees’ lead to 9-1.

The homer was 106.7 mph off the bat and traveled 403 feet, per Statcast. Reminder: he’s doing this without the (somewhat overrated) torpedo bats.

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Florida assistant coaches John Andrzejek and Kevin Hovde are racking up the hours before the Final Four. So is Houston assistant Quannas White ahead of Saturday’s national semifinals at the Alamodome.
Yet all three are doing more than fine-tuning scouting reports or breaking down video of their opponents. There’s also work — fit carefully into an already-stuffed schedule — to get started on running their own programs.
Andrzejek is headed to Campbell, Hovde to Columbia and White to Louisiana-Lafayette in hirings that have already been announced.

Former Michigan State forward Xavier Booker is transferring to another Big Ten school.
News broke on Friday evening that Booker is officially transferring to UCLA. One college basketball insider reported that he was expected to go to UCLA earlier on Friday and it became official a few hours later.
Booker is a former five-star prospect in the 2023 class, and is one of the highest-rated prospects to ever sign with Michigan State. Booker, however, struggled to see extended playing time during his two years with the Spartans.
Booker only started five games and averaged 11.