MINNEAPOLIS — Connecticut has spent virtually three a long time as essentially the most formidable risk in ladies’s school basketball, harmful even when not ranked No. 1 in Division I for weeks at a time — which is the place the Huskies spent a good portion of that point.
However after dropping to South Carolina on Sunday night time, the Huskies now not have an ideal file in N.C.A.A. championship video games. For the primary time since 2008, some UConn gamers will graduate with out having gained a nationwide title. And this system, so usually considered a dynasty, is within the midst of its longest championship drought since profitable the primary of its 11 championships in 1995. Although it has been a fixture within the Ultimate 4 in recent times, its final championship was in 2016.
“That is UConn, so it’s a nationwide championship or nothing,” the star sophomore guard Paige Bueckers mentioned after the sport, searching at reporters with red-rimmed eyes. “I’m clearly upset, annoyed and disillusioned.”
Her coach, Geno Auriemma, was uncharacteristically subdued whereas talking with reporters after the sport. As an alternative of ascribing the defeat to his gamers’ “immaturity,” as he did after final 12 months’s nationwide semifinal loss to Arizona, the second-winningest coach in Division I ladies’s basketball historical past insisted he was happy with his workforce for making it this far.
Auriemma went by the laundry record of hurdles the Huskies had overcome in the course of the season — most of them associated to staying wholesome — and added that ahead Olivia Nelson-Ododa had performed with an damage sustained in Friday’s recreation towards Stanford, and that freshman guard Azzi Fudd had fallen unwell in a single day and hadn’t gone to shootaround.
The workforce actually confronted loads of adversity. Most notable amongst its varied setbacks was Bueckers’ midseason knee damage, which contributed to the Huskies’ worst common season in 17 years.
Even that damage, although, nonetheless doesn’t account for the questions that loom over each transfer Auriemma makes at this level in his storied profession: Is the fabled UConn Huskies dynasty dropping its energy? Is that this loss, greater than any of the earlier Ultimate 4 defeats, the one which indicators the tip of an period?
“It’s one other reminder of how onerous it’s to win right here,” Auriemma mentioned. “Often the higher workforce wins while you get right here, and we simply weren’t adequate.”
Listening to Auriemma say that it’s onerous to win can sound virtually unbelievable, contemplating how straightforward he has made it search for the previous three a long time. Connecticut has lengthy had the higher workforce in its video games — it has spent total seasons blowing out groups by 30 or 40 factors, and practically cruised to its 11 championships.
UConn’s dominance could have begun to recede, however the stretch with no title can be a testomony to the expansion of packages constructed to problem its place on the high of the heap. South Carolina, for instance, is now a two-time champion whose declare to powerhouse standing is made stronger by the truth that, not like in 2017, the Gamecocks needed to undergo the Huskies to win this championship.
“A whole lot of what we’re in a position to do and get is off the backs of their success,” South Carolina Coach Daybreak Staley mentioned earlier than the championship recreation. “I feel the individuals up at UConn deal with their ladies’s basketball workforce as a sport. They’re pressured to due to all of the profitable and all of the success, however you possibly can take a web page out of their ebook.”
Whether or not this loss is attributable to the Huskies not being what they was, the event of even stiffer competitors or only a slew of unhealthy breaks — maybe all three causes are legitimate — Auriemma is optimistic that his younger workforce could have a lot to supply subsequent season.
“I like our possibilities,” mentioned Auriemma, who will return his two A-list recruits in Fudd and Bueckers and add Ayanna Patterson and Isuneh Brady, each ranked within the high 5 of the 2022 class by ESPN.
“Offered we don’t must navigate a season like we did this 12 months, and — knock on wooden — if we keep wholesome,” Auriemma mentioned, “I count on to be again right here subsequent 12 months.”
Supply: NY Times
