UCLA softball All-American Megan Grant taking her shot with Bruins basketball
UCLA softball star Megan Grant had always needled her coach about playing two sports for the Bruins.
She’d tease associate head coach Lisa Fernandez relentlessly, but both women understood that beneath the humor lived real ambition. The idea would get brushed off — the two-time All-American and 2025 USA Softball Player of the Year finalist already had enough obligations on the diamond. She had just come off a 2025 junior season in which she set a Big Ten record for home runs in a season with 26.
What the 21-year-old didn’t know was that her banter with Fernandez was spreading through the UCLA athletics community. So when a trainer for the women’s basketball team approached Grant shortly before the season and said, “I heard you could be joining the basketball team,” she froze.
“I was like, ‘Wait, what? You heard that?’” Grant said in a phone interview with The Athletic. “Those were just jokes. Funny rumors.”
Days later, humor turned into reality. Head softball coach Kelly Inouye-Perez called Grant to ask whether her quips about pulling double duty were merely playful — or something she actually meant.
Grant couldn’t believe it.
“(Inouye-Perez) told me, ‘I’m on the phone with (UCLA women’s basketball coach Cori Close) now,’” Grant recalled. “‘We’re talking about it.’”
Soon after, the star slugger, Inouye-Perez and Close sat down at the basketball coach’s house.
On Nov. 4, the punchline came to life. Grant checked into her first collegiate basketball game, logging two minutes in UCLA’s season opener, a 77-53 win over San Diego State. Ten days later, she scored her first points in a 78-60 victory over North Carolina.
“So proud,” her mother Christine Grant said in a phone interview with The Athletic. “She walked on to the court with two minutes left, and it just didn’t matter. I could tell her heart was full.”
MEGAN GRANT IS ON THE SCOREBOARD 🚨🚨🚨#GoBruins | @ChefMeganCookin x @UCLASoftballpic.twitter.com/xkEhned8mt
— UCLA Women’s Basketball (@UCLAWBB) November 14, 2025
From San Bruno, Calif., about 12 miles south of San Francisco, Grant didn’t grow up on softball fields. Her older brothers, Devin and Camron, played baseball, so she did, too — largely because the most competitive youth travel team in the area played with white, stitched leather.
She was equally devoted to hoops in those early years, believing for a time that her college career would likely take place on the hardwood. She’ll tell you basketball was always her first love. She imagined herself pouring in points, not belting line drives.
Before attending Aragon High School in nearby San Mateo, Grant and her mother weighed a future defined by overhand or underhand pitches. Tired of playing against boys, Grant switched to softball in 2017, when she was in seventh grade.
She arrived at one of her first games with the West Bay Warriors, an elite fastpitch travel team, with baseball bats rattling inside her bag. A teammate handed her a softball bat, which was lighter and slightly thinner than the bats Grant had been using.
Mistake.
According to her mother, Grant hit a pitch so hard that night that the metal bat broke, with a piece from the handle skittering toward second base.
Grant received attention from college coaches soon after she picked up the sport. National camps became her proving ground. One of them — a UCLA camp — put her squarely on the Bruins’ radar. Inouye-Perez credits Fernandez with identifying Grant early and maintaining the relationship.
“She was a standout early,” Inouye-Perez told The Athletic. “Just her size — she stood out, strength-wise, and her natural skills were easy to identify earlier. She’s someone who’s unique. Some girls are smaller and not as strong at that time, so you’re projecting, but for her, she was clearly a standout.”
In January 2018, on Grant’s birthday weekend (her birthday is Jan. 25th), the UCLA coaching staff met with Grant and her family to ask her to commit to play softball for the Bruins. Grant was a few days away from turning 13. The decision facing her felt disproportionate to her age.
A few months later, the NCAA adopted new recruiting policies: Division I softball programs could not initiate contact with high-school athletes until September 1 of their junior year. “I wish they kind of had the rule sooner, because a 12-year-old doesn’t even know what they’re eating for dinner,” Grant said. “It’s hard to make a life decision that big when you’re that young.”
She’d seen UCLA’s campus and facilities, and she’d heard the recruiting pitch: UCLA had 12 NCAA championships (they added a 13th in 2019), more than any other school, and a legacy that sits atop the college softball world. But, at 12 years old, Grant still needed clarity on what committing to a school actually meant.
“She was hesitant,” Christine said. “She said, ‘I don’t want to go to college tomorrow.’ We had to tell her, ‘You’re not going to college tomorrow. That’s not what this is.’”
Grant committed that day.
Once the future Bruin reached high school, she quickly validated Inouye-Perez’s early leap of faith. As a freshman, Grant hit .500 with 13 home runs, 51 RBI, 42 hits, 11 doubles and 33 runs.
“It was outstanding,” Inouye-Perez said. “It’s always the best story that you can have, because you’re always projecting. And what they do in high school doesn’t always guarantee they’re going to transition into the collegiate level.”
By the time she graduated in 2022, Grant was the No. 2 recruit in the country, according to Extra Inning Softball. MaxPreps ranked her No. 12, and FloSoftball had her at No. 20. SportStars Magazine, which covers California high-school sports, ranked Grant as the third-best overall high-school athlete — across all sports — in the Bay Area.
So how often were Inouye-Perez and Fernandez monitoring Grant’s gaudy stat lines?
“Every day,” the Bruin head softball coach said.
All tied up‼️@UCLASoftball star Megan Grant’s two-out, two-run HR evens the score in the 7th inning.#B1GSoftball on ABC 📺 pic.twitter.com/xwvLFZslAZ
— Big Ten Softball (@B1Gsoftball) June 1, 2025
But Grant’s affection for basketball never dimmed. “Basketball’s my first love, for sure,” she said. “I grew up watching YouTube videos of Michael Porter Jr., Trae Young, and always Stephen Curry and the Warriors.”
It’s a list headlined by a two-time NBA MVP in Curry and a four-time All-Star in Young. So, naturally, who does she model her game after?
“MPJ, definitely,” she said. “His game made me want to shoot — not just layups — but step out and expand my range. So kudos to him.”
Her commitment to softball put an end to summers on the AAU basketball circuit, but she kept playing high school ball. Grant’s training routine throughout high school was relentless: morning workout, a full day of school, hitting practice, basketball practice, shots afterward. Then sleep and repeat.
As she began dominating at softball, she rarely regretted letting basketball take a backseat. By the time she reached Westwood, hoops had faded to a side hobby. The diamond demanded the totality of her talent.
And it received it.
Grant has become a multi-positional force for Inouye-Perez’s Bruins. Through three seasons, she has appeared in 180 games and started in 178 of them: 70 in right field, 61 at first base, 31 at third base, eight as a designated player, five in left field, and three at shortstop. She owns a career .348 average with 49 home runs, including six grand slams and four multi-homer games.
She has been all-conference every season, leading UCLA to Pac-12 titles in 2023 and ’24 before UCLA joined the Big Ten in 2025, and to the Women’s College World Series in each of the past two years (2024 and ’25).
Now a senior, she’s back juggling both sports. The agreement between her and her coaches is simple: softball stays the priority, but she’s free to double-dip “as much as possible.” Grant is respected across the UCLA campus for the spirit and competitiveness she brings to any team. Close wanted an athlete with that kind of character in the women’s basketball locker room, and Inouye-Perez was willing to oblige.
“Women’s basketball needed some depth and some practice players to help,” Inouye-Perez said. “(Close) knew the culture of the softball program and that Megan is somebody who could help their culture and help them train and practice.”
Her return to the court has reminded Grant of the different mental challenges each sport presents. In softball, she’ll wait several minutes between at-bats — time to stew over a strikeout, but also to process it, move on from the frustration and decide how to approach her next trip to the plate. After missing a shot in basketball, she has to immediately move on to the next play, whether that’s sprinting back on defense or resetting the offense if a teammate grabs an offensive rebound.
The hardest part was dealing with those basketball mental challenges,” Grant said. “You might strike out and not hit again for two or three innings. In basketball, everything happens so fast.”
The differing physical demands of both sports also required Grant to adjust her training. Basketball’s constant motion forced her to improve her cardiovascular conditioning and quickness, which she believes will sharpen her burst on the basepaths.
In a smaller hoops locker room, Grant has observed how relationships between players can grow tighter. But this year’s softball team, she says, is showing a rare level of connectivity.
One quality, however, has remained remarkably consistent across Grant’s experiences playing for Close’s basketball team and Inouye-Perez’s softball squad.
The UCLA expectation.
“They both hold the standard equally,” Grant said. “The standard will always be the standard. That never changes, no matter the sport.”
On the court, UCLA reached the 2025 Women’s Final Four. On the field, the Bruins returned to the Women’s College World Series.
Grant isn’t the first two-sport athlete in women’s college sports; she’s not even the first at UCLA. In addition to being a four-time All-American on the Bruins’ basketball team, Ann Meyers Drysdale earned two varsity letters in volleyball and one in track and field from 1975 to 1979. Natalie Williams, who played basketball and volleyball at in the early ’90s, became the first woman in history to earn first-team All-America honors in both sports in the same academic year in 1992-93. Grant’s basketball teammate, Gabriela Jaquez, suited up for one UCLA softball game against Georgia in 2024.
Grant hopes to carry that lineage forward. “The next generation is so important,” she said. “They can do it just as much as I can. If I’m making that push, I feel like others can too, and I’m honored to be that inspiration.”
UCLA softball standout Megan Grant makes her basketball debut tonight 🔥 @PrepGirlsHoopspic.twitter.com/6fJ9zRcATW
— Prep Softball 🥎 (@PrepSoftball) November 4, 2025
Her post-college vision is fixed on playing softball for Team USA at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Whether her path runs through the new Athletes Unlimited pro league in America or Japan’s Diamond League, her ambitions center on medals. For now, though, her attention belongs to the basketball still ahead.
The idea of playing both sports began with half-hearted comments to her coach — the kind of talk that sounds unserious until it isn’t.
“If somebody laughed about it, if it was a joke, Megan would be like, ‘No, it’s not funny,’” Christine, her mother, said. “She’d say, ‘How do I do it?’ If it was a joke, it was already in motion.”
Maybe they were never jokes at all.
Either way, no one’s laughing anymore.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
UCLA Bruins, College Sports, Women’s College Basketball
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