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How Caroline Ducharme overcame injuries – and her own doubts – to return to basketball

The redshirt junior missed 63 games over a span of 461 days due to head and neck issues before returning last month.

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Daniel Connolly
March 06, 2025

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Photo: Ian Bethune

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How Caroline Ducharme overcame injuries – and her own doubts – to return to basketball

Caroline Ducharme always wanted to return to basketball. As she worked to recover from a series of head and neck injuries that derailed her college career, she never wavered in her ultimate goal.

“For Carol, none of us knew where this was going this year,” Geno Auriemma explained. “Some conversations involved: ‘If there is basketball, this is what it will look like. If there isn't basketball, what do you want it to look like?’ … For her, it always came back with, ‘I'm playing.’”

Yet over the last year and a half as Ducharme missed 63 games — more than she’d played in her entire career with the Huskies — there were moments where even she doubted whether she would ever get back on the court.

“I always was set on coming back but I'm not gonna lie, there were definitely times, especially last year, where I didn't know if it would actually happen,” she admitted.

Ultimately, Ducharme’s perseverance paid off. On Feb. 22, she made a surprise season debut against Butler, checking into the final 2:21 of the contest. The appearance was long-awaited and pre-planned, though simultaneously spur-of-the-moment.

“I had gotten cleared a couple days before that, so it's still a quick turnaround — practice is not like a game,” Ducharme explained. “So [Auriemma] was like, ‘You'll see how you feel,’ — and it's still always up to how I feel. So it was still ‘See how you feel Friday,’ and then when the game came, I felt good at shoot-around and then he was like, ‘So you want to play?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’”

“I looked over at one point and said, ‘You want to play?’ And she jumped off the bench,” Auriemma added on his radio show.

Since then, Ducharme has seen action in UConn’s last two games. She logged just a single minute against Creighton but followed it up with a season-high seven minutes in the finale vs. Marquette.

Even with that, expectations should be kept at a minimum for now. Not only does she have to knock off some significant rust considering she hadn’t played since Nov. 14, 2023, the Huskies also have to prioritize their preparation for the NCAA Tournament. They might not be able to afford Ducharme many minutes, if any.

“The biggest thing is going to be finding time,” Auriemma said. “At a time when teams are shrinking their rotation, we're adding players. So it's not how much time is she allowed to have, it’s finding time for all these guys that are coming back.”

Ducharme understands that, though. As a redshirt junior, she still has another year of eligibility left and plans to use it at UConn. Anything that she gets from this season will be a bonus.

“I have a long way to go and [I’m] just using this year to get ready to be fully, fully ready to go next year,” she said.

The Milton, Massachusetts native has been through a lot since she first arrived in Storrs back in 2021. The problems started during her freshman year when she missed four contests with a head injury. Though the team specified that it wasn’t a concussion, it still affected her the rest of the way.

The next season, she was sidelined for 13 games with a concussion after running into a screen in practice. That summer during UConn’s European trip, she took a ball off the head in an exhibition and sat out the remaining contests. Four games into the 2023-24 campaign, severe turbulence on the team’s flight to the Cayman Islands accentuated her head and neck issues. She was shut down and eventually missed the remainder of the season.

At that point, Ducharme’s ailments had begun to impact her day-to-day life. Early in the year, she explained how she needed to avoid bright lights and loud noises while also managing screen time and school work. Fixing that was step one.

A crucial turning point came when she returned to campus over the summer.

“When I came back this summer after doing rehab, that's when I really started to feel better off the court,” Ducharme said. “Doing all that rehab and stepping away and all that kind of stuff helped me to really get my life back.”

From there, she could start working towards a return to basketball in earnest.

“Once I got back to school and started actually working out and moving, then I was like, ‘Okay, I think I could really do this again,’” Ducharme said.

That process took time, though. Sixth months passed from the time she returned to Storrs for the start of the fall semester until she took the court at Butler.

“First I was just doing workouts, no contact. I had the jersey, nobody would touch me,” she said with a laugh. “It was very much, ‘Be careful. She's out there but she's not really out there.’ Then once I got the okay [for contact where] they can hit you and you can play contact, it did plateau just because that's a huge, a huge step. So then once I started getting more comfortable with that… I started to actually feel better.”

But unlike earlier points in her career, Ducharme isn’t just one bump to the head away from going back on the shelf. She passed that test with flying colors in practice recently.

“I was telling one of our coaches the other day, Tonya (Cardoza), I got an elbow to the head,” Ducharme said. “Nothing crazy but two years ago I would have been out for a couple weeks — at least. She was like, ‘I didn't even notice.’ So that was a big sigh relief for me that I was fine and I could continue.”

Ducharme currently dons a padded headband when she takes the court but admitted it isn’t so much for protection as it is just to make her feel better. Auriemma gave her a hard time by calling it her “binky.”

Whatever works, though. After all, Ducharme is here to play. Over the course of Ducharme’s extensive recovery, she was adamant that she wouldn’t accept some choreographed event to get her back on the court — a la Nykesha Sales. If she were to do it, she wanted to to do it for real.

“I always told them I didn't want to come back just to just to say I did it. I wanted to actually come back,” Ducharme said. “So it's still a process and obviously I still have a long way to go but actually being able to be on the court was a good first step.”

Auriemma isn’t surprised, though.

“If you're a kid that doesn't love basketball, there'd be no point. There'd be no point to hang around and even attempt to come back. You would just walk away from it and say, ‘I'm done,’” he said. “But she has such a love for the game and feels ‘I still have a lot to offer,’ and wanted to at least give it a shot and see where it takes her.”

It took a lot for Ducharme to get back to this point. Regardless of what the future may hold, that’s worth celebrating.

“It just felt good,” she said. “I didn't know necessarily if this would happen. It's taken a lot of hard work and mentally it's been hard. So this one felt good.”

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