STORRS — A new reporter towered over the postgame press conference after the UConn women’s basketball team’s 94-44 rout of Creighton, hand eagerly raised several feet above the rest of the media to ask the first question to coach Geno Auriemma.
Ex-NBA center Boban Marjanovic was on campus Wednesday filming content for a project with Bleacher Report, and though it was his first time watching the Huskies in person, even the 7-foot-4 Serbian knew exactly what the storyline of the night was.
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“I think everybody has this question, that’s why I wanted to ask first,” Marjanovic said with a grin. “Sarah Strong (was) back in the lineup tonight. Did you miss her?”
Strong, the runaway frontrunner for national player of the year in 2026, ended a streak of 64 consecutive starts for the Huskies when she sat out of last Saturday’s matchup against Butler for rest to manage a lingering tightness in her calves. Much to the relief of both the UConn fans and the team itself, she was able to return Wednesday after a single game on the bench.
“Yeah, I always miss her,” Auriemma answered Marjanovic earnestly. “So do the other players.”
By Strong’s uniquely-high standards, her outing against Creighton was fairly unimpressive. She finished with 16 points, three rebounds, three assists and a block, and she shot 5-for-9 from the field going 2-for-3 on 3-pointers. The sophomore was only on the court for 19 minutes, just the second time in her college career she’s played less than 20.
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It also appeared Strong wasn’t 100% healthy: The star forward abruptly left the game with two minutes left in the first quarter and appeared to vomit in the trash can on the Huskies’ sideline before briefly going to back to the locker room. She returned to the bench barely two minutes later but put up just four points after the incident. Auriemma said he didn’t put an intentional cap on Strong’s minutes in her return, but he wanted to ease her back into playing at full capacity to make sure she’d be able to compete in the next game Saturday at Marquette.
“When you don’t play, the hardest thing is to keep up your conditioning,” Auriemma said. “You can get on the (stationary) bike or you can do other stuff, but playing basketball is how you get conditioned to play basketball … So gradually coming back and just kind of keeping an eye on her. It wasn’t a definitive, ‘this is how many minutes.’ I just wanted to watch her and feel like I’ve seen enough that now she can start getting ready for Saturday.”
But all it took was those first eight minutes of the first quarter for Strong to show exactly why she’s so irreplaceable for the Huskies. While the rest of the team started 3-for-10 from the field, Strong shot 4-for-6 to account for 12 of UConn’s 19 points in the quarter. She scored eight consecutively over a single minute, going bucket for bucket with Creighton to keep the Bluejays from ever opening up a lead larger than two points.
Though Strong leads UConn in every major statistical category, the Huskies don’t necessarily need Strong to be productive. They routed Butler 80-48 without her, and the team got contributions from every player that saw the floor with five scoring in double digits. But even on a team loaded with talent, Strong stands out as the best of the best because of how easily she can erase the mistakes of anyone else around her.
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“We’ve been really fortunate to not have to experience her off the court too much, but when she’s on the court it’s just like a sense of peace and harmony, like all things are right in the world,” star guard Azzi Fudd said Wednesday. “Sarah does so much for our team on both ends of the floor — makes good passes, sets great screens, is in the right place on defense. She saves us so many times on defense with her blocks and her help side. She does everything, so having her, I feel like she just covers for us and makes things run so smoothly.”
Strong’s presence is a comfort Auriemma doesn’t take for granted, especially after seeing what the game looks like without her. Because her skillset is so elite in so many different areas of the game, the list of factors he has to worry about on the sideline shrinks significantly when Strong is on the court.
“Do I feel a difference when Sarah Strong is on the floor? If somebody stops hitting you in the head with a hammer, would you feel better? That’s kind of how it is,” Auriemma joked. “When you (take) somebody like Sarah (off) the floor, you’re missing a great shooter, a great post player, a terrific passer, you’re missing another ball handler, and maybe our best defender. One person out of the lineup is like losing three or four people … You saw that first quarter. Everything looked broken, and she just single-handedly took the game and made sure it was okay.”
UConn women’s basketball smothers Creighton in second half to earn largest win in series history
