Can Caroline Ducharme still make an impact with UConn?

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Can Caroline Ducharme still make an impact with UConn?

Through UConn’s first 11 games, Caroline Ducharme has appeared in nine, totaling 87 minutes. While that doesn’t sound like much, over the last two years combined, she made it into just 13 games for 94 minutes. In that sense, Ducharme’s season has already been a success.

But Ducharme has higher aspirations than simply being on the court.

“She's putting a lot of pressure on herself to try to get back to where she was,” Geno Auriemma said. “She'll have flashes where she looks really, really good and then she'll be less than what she wants to be and gets frustrated and tries really hard.”

To this point, Ducharme hasn’t looked like the player that came in as the No. 5 recruit in the class of 2021 and kept UConn afloat when injuries struck during her freshman season. She currently finds herself on the outside the rotation, typically only seeing time when the Huskies are up big. Ducharme hasn’t played more than 13 minutes in a single contest and has totaled just 14 points on the season.

Auriemma acknowledged she may never get back to that level and has tried to get her to understand that, too.

“It's taken, obviously, a toll and she's not 100 percent the player that she was,” the coach said on his radio show last week.

That’s not to say all hope is lost for Ducharme, though. She can still make an impact on the court during her final year in Storrs, it just may not be the same way she would’ve four years ago.

“It's just being able to adjust to the new you,” Auriemma said. “That was part of the conversation we had.”

Ducharme took a positive step forward in UConn’s win over Marquette on Wednesday. She put together one of her better outings of the season, finishing with four points, an assist, a steal and a rebound in 11 minutes.

“I'm glad some things worked really well for her today,” Auriemma said. “She looks like somewhat of her old self.”

After missing so much time, Ducharme never expected to just pick up where she left off. Even though Auriemma declared that she looked “really, really good” during summer workouts, the redshirt senior set more tangible goals for the season.

“Those are my biggest goals: Continue to improve, continue to get healthy and see where that takes me,” Ducharme said in June.

She’s already checked off the first two boxes. From what we know, she’s remained healthy (though she appeared to nearly vomit on the court late against Marquette) and according to the head coach, has made progress in practice, albeit slowly.

“I think she'll get it back little by little,” Auriemma said. “It's different practicing. Getting into a game is a little bit different.”

Even still, it’ll be hard for Ducharme to see a dramatic increase in minutes. UConn has 13 healthy players at the moment and a clear rotation of nine. It’s not easy for anybody currently on the outside to break in.

“Just because you deserve [minutes], the person ahead of you has to not deserve them. Otherwise you have two people that are deserving and there's not enough minutes for two,” Auriemma explained. “So you have to be efficient with the minutes you do get, then you start to build trust — trust among your teammates, trust from your coaches — that you can handle yourself in situations where the coaches are going to need you or where we want to put you in.”

The good news? Ducharme already has the latter covered. Even with all the time she’s missed, she has retained Auriemma’s confidence.

“That doesn't mean I would hesitate to put her in any situation,” he said on his radio show.

UConn has 20 games left in the regular season (along with at least eight more in the postseason, presumably). Whether Ducharme can put it together on the court in that time remains to be seen. But even if she doesn’t, she’ll still find a way to make an impact on this year’s team.

“I’ve been really happy. They're great teammates, great to be around them,” Auriemma said about Ducharme and Ayanna Patterson. “So I'm pretty comfortable with how they've played and I can only hope they just keep getting better.”

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