STORRS, Conn. — As games ticked by last March, praise for Paige Bueckers rose outside the UConn women’s basketball program. But coach Geno Auriemma sensed something different about his All-American.
She led the injury-riddled Huskies deeper into the NCAA Tournament as she raised her level of play with each subsequent victory. Whenever the Huskies needed her, she tapped into a new level and showed greater competitiveness. She played all but five minutes through five NCAA Tournament games and bested her regular-season averages in points and assists while nearly doubling her regular-season rebounding average. But Auriemma wondered if she was also in her head. He couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was, though. He wrestled with whether to address it, fearing he’d somehow speak it into existence and rattle the player who was impressing everyone around her. He wondered if he was just in his head.
Ultimately, Auriemma didn’t say anything, and in retrospect — because everything in hindsight is 20/20 — he wishes he would have. Because he was right. What he sensed was a feeling Bueckers hadn’t experienced at UConn before.
Fear.
“I was so afraid to lose that I just didn’t remember how to win,” Bueckers said.
She added: “Every day I woke up and thought, ‘I don’t want to lose.’”
In the Final Four, against Iowa and Caitlin Clark — the No. 4 player in the 2020 recruiting class (when Bueckers was No. 1) — UConn did lose. The Huskies went home to Storrs. The drought between national titles for UConn grew to eight years — an eternity for the program that owns a record 11 championships. Bueckers, in her fourth season, third NCAA Tournament and third trip to the Final Four, didn’t hoist a trophy.
It was back to the drawing board for Bueckers and Auriemma.
Bueckers began to look ahead to the 2024-25 season. Her fifth year at UConn will likely be her last in Storrs. She can choose to return for a sixth season but has indicated she’ll enter the WNBA Draft. Most importantly, this is likely her last shot at a national title.
If putting a public deadline on her career wasn’t pressure enough, the banners in the practice gym are a bonus, too. On the gym’s walls, banners hang for every All-American and national player of the year. The Huskies have had seven players win the prestigious Naismith Award and nine win the AP National Player of the Year award. Except for one player, all won a national title. Maya Moore won two, Diana Taurasi won three and Breanna Stewart won four.
The lone player in that group without a national title? Bueckers.
UConn hasn’t hung a banner for her 2021 Naismith and AP awards yet, and her life-size likeness isn’t yet imprinted on the hallway leading to the basketball facilities at UConn along with every other national player of the year. (The program and Bueckers decided to wait until she left Storrs to do that.)
Bueckers is surrounded by greatness and reminders of what eludes her: a national championship. It’s a specific paradox that exists only at UConn.
“I think it scares her to leave here and be the best player ever to play at UConn without winning a national championship — that it affects your legacy a little bit,” Auriemma said. “I’ve never said that, and I don’t believe that, but I’ve gotta believe she thinks that, that she needs that to validate who she is. … I don’t believe that that’s the ultimate identifier of what true success is.”
This now becomes the balance beam upon which Auriemma walks this season as Bueckers leads the No. 2 Huskies. Auriemma has, potentially, the best player in the country, who has transcended women’s basketball fame and attention and has won almost everything there is to win in college sports.
Almost.
That shadow still follows Bueckers: Of all the greats who’ve come through UConn, how could Bueckers — of all players — leave without a national title?
This tension presented Auriemma with a unique challenge this season. He saw how the pressure mounted on Bueckers’ shoulders last season as injuries forced her into a position in which wins and losses seemingly rested on her performance alone. It reminded him of Taurasi’s senior season. She had started her college career around four future first-rounders, and then each new season presented different challenges that required her to take on more and more. After a particularly grueling stretch during her senior season, Auriemma found Taurasi crying alone in the back of the locker room. Taurasi had already won two national titles, but in her final go-around at UConn, she felt she needed to carry the team single-handedly over the finish line. It got to her.
“I don’t know that I ever said, ‘Dee, this is all on you,’” Auriemma said. “No, I just think that’s who Dee is. … But it’s a heavy load to carry.”
Auriemma understands it might be heavier for Bueckers, who doesn’t have the national championship experience to help her navigate pressure or alleviate pain points.
Without that road map for Bueckers, Auriemma has continued to bring her mindset into what’s right in front of her. It’s an approach he has always used, but in this unique season for Bueckers, it’s that much more important that it works: Focus on today. Concentrate on the little things. Bring your vision to just what you can see in front of you, and fix that.
“It’s just about becoming more process-focused,” Bueckers said. “Before, I was results-focused, super driven to win the national title. But now it’s more like I’m super driven to win every single day. If we don’t win every day, if we don’t build the great habits, if we don’t conquer every day in front of us, then we won’t get to the end goal we all want to get to.”
This doesn’t mean Bueckers will avoid the program pressure that Auriemma has historically put on his best players. As he did with Sue Bird, Taurasi, Moore and Stewart, he wants Bueckers to lead by being responsible for everything that happens on the floor. Every missed assignment, every turnover and every miscue should be felt most heavily by Bueckers. To emphasize this, Auriemma started using a tactic he hadn’t tried with many teams before: watching film before every practice and highlighting areas that needed to be addressed immediately.
“It makes it current, fresh — ‘This just happened yesterday,’” Auriemma said. “(They say), ‘Hey, I’m working on it.’ Well, it doesn’t look like it right now. So the next time we watch, there has to be a change. We have to address these little things. They’re not little; they add up.”
It makes sense when the focus is on limiting (and then eliminating) as many of the small mistakes as possible. For UConn to reach the heights of previous teams, Bueckers — like those players before her — must navigate this pressure. At UConn, there’s no way to ignore the expectations (players who want a low-stress approach don’t exactly flock to Storrs). It’s about Bueckers choosing to embrace the pressures that best serve her development. Those pressures aren’t the external ones of what people think of her legacy and her chances to win a title (and what it means if she does not). Instead, she’s embracing a more myopic approach, tuning out the noise and not thinking too far ahead. Bueckers’ sports psychologist, whom she began seeing last offseason, has also encouraged this mindset.
Already this season, Bueckers and the Huskies have been tested. In their first two Top 25 matchups, they let their foot off the gas. Last weekend, against then-No. 22 Louisville, UConn self-corrected. Bueckers didn’t have her strongest shooting night, but she impacted every other part of the game, finishing with 8 points, 10 rebounds and six assists. Thursday night, UConn faces its toughest challenge yet of the season as it travels to South Bend to face No. 8 Notre Dame and its vaunted backcourt.
Each marquee game allows Bueckers another opportunity to test her process-focused approach this season; every day is a chance to fix whatever didn’t go right the day before.
“All you can do is all you can do. And are you doing all you can do? Are you preparing properly to put yourself in a position to accomplish that?” Auriemma said. “If the answer is no, then what areas need to be addressed? The pressure to attack those things is doable because that’s not pressure, in a sense. It’s a commitment that you make to yourself.”
That commitment and that smaller, singular focus that Auriemma and others helped Bueckers instill over the offseason have brought back joy for Bueckers on the floor this year. She says she sometimes still feels a tug and thinks about the broader picture — her career, her legacy, the games she hasn’t won — but she’s trying to keep a more narrow view.
“I’ve always looked at pressure as a privilege,” Bueckers said. “Obviously, there’s a sense of urgency coming in. Coming to UConn, you expect to win national championships. To have a career and not win a national championship? Obviously, I feel a little bit of the pressure. I’m more looking at it as like a challenge, and I’m not trying to get too occupied with the fact that I’m trying to win a national title, but I’m trying to win every single day.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Connecticut Huskies, Women’s College Basketball
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