UConn has no answers for continuing injury problems

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Headlines

Game coverage

• UConn women’s basketball dominates Providence, 85-41

• The Aftermath: UConn's defense forces turnover frenzy against Providence

• Photo gallery: Providence Friars at UConn

• UConn women’s basketball cruises past St. John’s, 92-49

• Photo gallery: UConn Huskies women’s basketball at St. John’s

• UConn women’s basketball powers past Seton Hall, 83-59

News/analysis

• Chasing Perfection: Ice, Ice Brady

• UConn is seeing more from Ice Brady

• Why Amari DeBerry isn't part of the rotation

Last week’s Weekly

• Before UConn, Aaliyah Edwards and Nika Mühl were roommates at NBA Academy

Elsewhere

• UConn is back in the AP Top 10: The Huskies are No. 9 in the latest poll, a four-spot jump.

• Ashlynn Shade received Big East Freshman of the Week honors for the second week in a row.

• 2024 signees Morgan Cheli and Allie Ziebell are both on the Naismith Girls’ High School Midseason Team and have also been named to the Nike Hoops Summit Team. McDonalds All-Americans will be announced next Tuesday.

UConn has no answers for continuing injury problems

For the last three seasons, UConn has been bombarded by injuries — and the problem has seemingly only gotten worse. In 2021-22, the Huskies dealt with a lot but had everyone except Dorka Juhász and Aubrey Griffin back by their final game. The next year, they had Paige Bueckers and Ice Brady go down with season-ending injuries while plenty of others missed significant time but again, they had everyone back for their final game.

Now, UConn has a staggering four players done for the season and another in Caroline Ducharme out indefinitely. In the short term, the Huskies are just trying to make it work with who they have left. But in the wider picture, they’re searching for the reason why it keeps happening.

Yet after all this time, UConn still doesn’t have an answer.

“The only thing you can do is say, ‘Okay, well, are we not doing something that we should be doing?’ It's odd,” head coach Geno Auriemma said. “You would say, ‘Well, what about before?’ This is the best, most comprehensive, thorough, technological sports science staff that we've had ever at UConn from top to bottom — from orthopedic surgeons down to our analytics people that sit by their computer every day and stare and try to figure things out. We've never, ever been this comprehensive in every everything we do.

“Paige’s words are: ‘It's hard to understand life when you do everything right and things turn out wrong.”

There’s no clear pattern to the injuries. There have been three torn ACLs (Bueckers, Griffin, Azzi Fudd), four other knee injuries (Bueckers, Fudd, Brady, Ayanna Patterson), two broken bones (Juhász’s wrist and thumb), a ruptured achilles (Jana El Alfy), back problems (Griffin) and head trauma (Caroline Ducharme), to name the major ones. As Auriemma put it, a lot of them are “unexplainable.”

“That's the part that it's just been confounding to a lot of people,” he said. “[It’s not like] they keep spraining their ankle or they keep getting calf injuries or they keep getting a pulled muscle here, a pulled muscle there.”

While UConn has been hit the worst, it’s not the only team in the country to deal with injury problems. Texas lost Rori Harmon to a torn ACL while Notre Dame is without Olivia Miles due to a knee injury suffered late last season and is also without some other key pieces. UNC had two current freshmen redshirt due to injuries from high school while TCU just forfeited a pair of games because they didn’t have enough healthy players. In the Big East, Providence had so many players go down that it had to start playing one of its grad assistants.

“You look around the country and a lot of coaches, a lot of teams are all dealing with it,” Auriemma said.

Yet nothing matches the length of scale of what’s occurred in Storrs.

Because of that, one person who’s been in the crosshairs of some looking to place blame is Andrea Hudy, the team’s director of sports performance. Part of that is due to her job title as well as the timing of her hire — May 2021, just as the injury issues began. Yet Bueckers, who’s dealt with the recovery from ankle surgery during the 2021 offseason, a tibial plateau fracture and lateral meniscus tear as a sophomore then a torn ACL as a junior, has spent plenty of time working with Hudy and went to bat in her defense.

“She's the best strength coach in the country,” Bueckers said. “It's natural to want to blame something but there's just some things that are unexplainable. I think she's the best strength coach in the country. She does so much for us. She dedicates her life to her job. We do everything right in the weight room, we do everything right on the court and still unfortunate situations can happen.”

It’s not as if UConn hasn’t tried to find answers externally, either. The team spoke to data and analytics experts about the increase in injuries for both the Huskies and nationally, but didn’t get much of an explanation.

So for now, UConn will persevere and hope the situation improves. Luckily, it has a group of players plenty equipped to handle what comes their way.

“They are pretty good at adjusting to whatever it is that we have,” Auriemma said. “We're pretty resilient group.”

Top play

A sneaky great play:

Photo of the week

Best of social media

Pretty cool place to practice:

29 years ago, it all began:

Little Dorka:

Bria Hartley (and her son) visited the team at St. John’s:

This Geno guy might know what he’s doing:

Geno hasn’t forgotten his roots: