The Aftermath: With wide smile, Azzi Fudd makes her return

At the 3:39 mark of the first quarter, Azzi Fudd ran to the scorer’s table to center court with a wide smile plastered across her face. For the first time in 374 days, she was going to play in a real, live basketball game — and she couldn’t contain her excitement.

“I was nervous, but just so excited,” Fudd said postgame. “I was so happy to be out there.”

It wasn’t just that the redshirt junior went down with a torn ACL two games into the 2023-24 season and had to watch all of last year from the sidelines. Fudd’s basketball career at large has been plagued by injury: The ACL, a pair of knee injuries in 2022-23, a stress reaction in her foot as a freshman at UConn, a sprained foot during her shortened senior season and a torn ACL and MCL in 2019.

It’s been years since Fudd last had an extended stretch of good health.

“Since her junior year in high school, she's missed more basketball than she's actually played,” Geno Auriemma said.

Now, a year removed from her most recent torn ACL, Fudd is fully healthy and hoping that Wednesday night can be the first page in a new, happier chapter of her career.

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