STORRS — The first time Geno Auriemma met with Sue Bird in his office on campus, the thing he remembers most is how nervous the star point guard was.
UConn women’s basketball, as Auriemma put it, “wasn’t what UConn is today” in the late 1990s when Bird was emerging as a high school superstar. The Huskies only had the 1995 national championship to their name, so Auriemma said the coaching staff was feeling the pressure to bring in a player of Bird’s caliber. But for all of her flair on the court, Bird was visibly uncomfortable being the center of attention during the recruiting process.
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“We’re more as coaches like, we really want to get her, and meanwhile she’s incredibly nervous and jittery about being in that environment and being made a fuss over like that,” Auriemma said Saturday. “Even to this day I tell her, ‘You were just overwhelmed because you wanted to come to Connecticut so bad that you were nervous about it.”
Bird, now a Huskies legend, was forced to get comfortable with the spotlight over the last two decades, perhaps never more so than in the past year. She retired from the WNBA after 20 seasons with the Seattle Storm in 2022 and has spent 2025 receiving the flowers that she rarely got while she was an active player. The Storm unveiled a statue of Bird in August in front of Climate Pledge Arena, making her the first player with a statue at a WNBA arena. She was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in June, then the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in September. Her tour of recognition will finally conclude on Sunday in Storrs when her No. 10 jersey is retired at Gampel Pavilion before the Huskies’ game against DePaul.
“It should be a really fun day,” Auriemma said. “I talked to the players about it, that it’s not often that you get to be a part of something like this. I know I’m excited about it, and hopefully they are as well.”
At UConn, Bird helped lead the Huskies to NCAA championships in 2000 and 2002 and to four Big East Tournament titles. She was a three-time winner of the Nancy Lieberman Award for the nation’s top point guard, and she was the unanimous national player of the year as a senior in 2002. Bird still holds the UConn career records for 3-point field goal percentage (45.9) and free throw percentage (89.2), and she ranks seventh all-time in career assists (585).
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Bird was UConn’s first-ever No. 1 pick in the WNBA Draft and went on to have one of the most prolific careers in league history. She retired as the WNBA’s all-time assist leader with 3,234, and she earned a WNBA-record 13 All-Star selections. She led the Storm to four WNBA Championships (2004, ’10, ’18, 20), tied for the second-most titles won by a single player. Bird also anchored Team USA to five consecutive Olympic gold medals and four FIBA World Championships.
The UConn women’s basketball program only retires the jerseys of players in the Naismith Hall of Fame, so Bird is joining an ultra-exclusive club that currently has just two members. The Huskies retired Rebecca Lobo’s No. 50 in 2019 and Swin Cash’s No. 32 in 2022, and Maya Moore will also have her No. 23 retired in the near future after she was inducted into the Hall of Fame alongside Bird this year. Bird’s jersey retirement ceremony will begin approximately 30 minutes before tipoff Sunday and will be available to stream on the team’s Facebook and X pages as well as on the UConn Huskies YouTube channel.
“It’s probably not fair that that’s the criteria. It’s kind of a ridiculous criteria to have, but I think it also represents how, in a list of some incredible people, how unique some really were,” Auriemma said. “The common thread if you look at Rebecca, Swin and Sue, and Maya coming up next, is obviously the basketball talent … the impact they had on their teams while they were here, singularly, and how synonymous with their team they became. And the amazing thing about these three and Maya was the incredible amount of success they had after they left here.”
On top of Bird’s return, the Huskies welcomed another pair of iconic alumni back to campus this week in Paige Bueckers and Aaliyah Edwards. Bueckers, fresh off her Rookie of the Year season with the Dallas Wings, and Edwards, who finished her second WNBA season with the Connecticut Sun, hadn’t been in the UConn gym together since they were teammates in 2023-24, and junior guard Ashlynn Shade said it was surreal to have the duo competing with the Huskies’ male practice players.
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“I’m like, I haven’t played with you since my freshman year. Like, that’s kind of crazy, and now I’m a junior, so it’s like wow, this is really weird,” Shade laughed. “But I think it’s so much fun having them back. It lightens practice a little bit when you have Paige and Aaliyah on the practice team and it’s not just the guys every day.”
Shade said the team wasn’t getting any trash talk from Edwards in practice, but Bueckers dished it to everyone including — even especially — her teammates on the practice squad. Auriemma quipped that Bueckers’ return was like “having Dennis the Menace back on campus,” but the UConn coach said he loves the dynamic of having former players back in the building around the current team.
“It’s just a different vibe when they’re there,” Auriemma said with a smile. “It’s great to reminisce about a lot of things. It’s great to see that they haven’t changed much, and yet it’s great to see how different they are just in the short time that they’ve been away.”
Dom Amore: UConn’s Sue Bird made pathways possible, made things happen along way to Hall of Fame
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How to watch UConn women’s basketball vs DePaul
Site: Gampel Pavilion, Storrs
Time/date: 1 p.m., Sunday
Team records: UConn 8-0, DePaul 2-7
Series record: UConn leads 26-1
Last meeting: 84-58 UConn, Jan. 29 in Chicago
TV: FS1
Streaming: FOX Sports app
Radio: UConn Sports Network on FOX Sports 97.9
