After snapping national title drought, UConn has its swagger back

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News

• Three former UConn players named WNBA All-Star starters

• Gabby Williams named WNBA All-Star reserve

• UConn women’s basketball set to feature in Apple TV+ series

• Big East signs multi-year digital rights agreement with ESPN+

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• Sarah Strong already looking "way better" during summer workouts

Last week’s Weekly

• Kayleigh Heckel believes UConn is 'the place I need to be'

After snapping national title drought, UConn has its swagger back

On a June day in Storrs, Azzi Fudd and Ashlynn Shade were out walking when a realization hit the fifth-year guard.

“Can you believe we won the national championship?” Fudd asked Shade. “That’s crazy. I still can’t believe it’s real.”

It’s not as if UConn didn’t properly celebrate the title. The Huskies hoisted the trophy as confetti fell and cut down the nets in Tampa. When they returned to campus, they were greeted with a championship rally at Gampel Pavilion. A week later, they paraded through the streets of Hartford. The Boston Celtics hosted them to commemorate the crown. They went on a whirlwind media tour.

Yet they still have a hard time wrapping their heads around the achievement. After all, none of the players knew what it took to win a national title. Nine years passed since UConn won it all and the last champions — Napheesa Collier and Katie Lou Samuelson —graduated half a decade ago. For years, the current Huskies practiced and played under the Huskies’ 11 championship banners but never raised any themselves.

The concept of winning a national title took on almost mythical status, so when UConn finally captured No. 12 in April, the players could hardly believe it.

“It feels weird that we won a national championship,” Shade said. “Not weird, because we deserved it and we worked our butts off for it, but it seems like it was so long ago that we did it. Like it didn't happen.”

“It’s still setting in,” Fudd added.

But now that they’ve reached the mountain top, UConn regained some of the swagger and mystique that faded over the previous nine years. Even if they haven’t fully processed it, the players still feel the difference.

“You can just see the way they walk around, they’ve got this look about them like, ‘I won a national championship,’ you know?” Geno Auriemma said.

That validation is especially important for this group of Huskies. For much of their collegiate careers, UConn’s veterans found themselves on the wrong side of program history.

During the 2021-22 campaign, they lost a conference matchup for the first time since 2013. They were the first Huskies ever to fall in a national championship. The next year, they dropped back-to-back games for the first time in 30 years then were responsible for the end of the 14-year Final Four streak after losing in the Sweet Sixteen.

In 2023-24, UConn got off to a 4-3 start — its worst start since Auriemma’s second season in charge — and fell to No. 17 in the AP Poll, its worst mark since the opening poll of the 1992-93 campaign. Between 2021-24, the Huskies lost 18 games — the most in a three-year span since 1991-94 and more than they’d had in the previous nine seasons combined.

While the run of injuries were far more responsible for all that than the players themselves, it still must’ve weighed on them. Now, they can shake it off and hold their heads high.

“It's a respect thing,” Shade said. “I think people see you and respect you a little bit more.”

“Everyone that's returning, you can tell as you walk in this gym and on the court, everyone just carries herself with a little bit more bounce, little more confidence to them,” Fudd said.

That doesn’t mean the Huskies plan to rest on their laurels next season, though. They’ve got a taste for winning again and with a fully loaded roster, they have their sights set on going back-to-back. Once everyone re-convened on campus for summer workouts, they put the national championship behind them and turned their focus to the upcoming campaign.

“Last year's team was last year's team,” KK Arnold said. “We have a new year coming up, a new team.”

“I don't think we're necessarily defending anything,” Fudd said. “This is a new team, a new season and we're all working towards the same thing.”

UConn’s players now know firsthand how difficult it is to win it all. If anything, that’s made them hungrier for another.

“They have higher standards now than they did before,” Auriemma said. “They are holding themselves to higher standards. They're holding each other to higher standards.”

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