STORRS — At the start of her freshman season with the UConn women’s basketball team in the fall of 2012, Breanna Stewart told reporters she intended to win four national championships before she graduated.
Coach Geno Auriemma, who already had seven titles including three repeat runs to his name, thought the 18-year-old superstar was crazy. Even after Stewart led the Huskies to championships in 2013 and ’14, earning Final Four MVP in both tournaments, he still wasn’t convinced.
Advertisement
Ahead of a Big East matchup against Villanova on Thursday, Stewart and nine of her former teammates will return to Gampel Pavilion to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of their 2015 and ’16 championships that completed the promised four-peat. UConn remains the only program in women’s basketball history to win four consecutive national titles, a feat that Auriemma can’t imagine will ever be replicated.
“I think the pressure to win here is immense, and the fact that they were able to transcend all that — I mean, that pressure didn’t bother them one iota,” Auriemma said Wednesday after practice. “It was a really unique time here, because the winning kind of became not even a focal point anymore. It was just the level of play, the excitement about the NCAA Tournament and how dominant those teams were.”
Stewart was the headliner of the legendary run with three unanimous national player of the year honors and four straight Final Four MVP awards, but the depth of talent that surrounded her on the court was unprecedented. Ten players across the 2015-16 rosters went on to play in the WNBA, and seven are still active in the league. Four have won WNBA titles — Stewart and Kiah Stokes are both three-time champions — and four have earned at least one All-Star recognition.
Even compared to his other championship rosters at UConn, including the squad that brought home the 2025 NCAA title, Auriemma said the groups that completed the four-peat were among the most talented ever assembled. When the program inducted the 2013-14 teams into the Huskies of Honor alongside the 2003-04 championship teams in January 2024, Auriemma remembers UConn great Diana Taurasi joking that she wouldn’t want to play against Stewart’s squads.
Advertisement
“Up and down the lineup, those teams had way more,” Auriemma said. “They had way more options. They had (future) 10-year, 15-year, WNBA players coming off the bench who were like, incredible supporters. The talent level on those teams was just extraordinary … You look back 10 years, and the level of success really is beyond what you could have predicted back then.”
Morgan Tuck, now the general manager of the Connecticut Sun, was one of three players alongside Stewart and point guard Moriah Jefferson who were on the roster for the entirety of the four-peat, and she said at the time she didn’t truly appreciate how rare the accomplishment was. The expectation when she committed to UConn was winning championships, so bringing home trophies all four years always felt like a realistic goal — even though it shouldn’t have.
“I think maybe at a different school that might have seemed even more outrageous, but going to UConn it’s like they already have seven, so we have to do our part,” Tuck said. “We all just had really high expectations and goals for ourselves. And then I think really after we got that first one it was like, ‘Okay, well now we have to, right?’
“So I think just UConn and the greatness of the program, even before we got there, really set the stage for us.”
Advertisement
Tuck said she sometimes still struggles to comprehend the magnitude of what she and her teammates achieved during those four years, but it hits her harder when they’re able to return to Storrs as a group for celebrations like Thursday’s night’s. All of Tuck’s classmates — Stewart, Jefferson and Briana Pulido — are scheduled to attend, as are 2015 graduates Stokes and Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis, 2017 graduate Tierney Lawlor, 2018 graduate Kia Nurse and 2019 graduates Napheesa Collier and Katie Lou Samuelson.
“I do think I’ll never appreciate it as much as someone on the outside, because it was more of an expectation for us,” Tuck said “I think I still feel that way, like yes, what we did was really special, and it was really great, but we did what we were supposed to do. But when we have these moments where … you’re literally there to celebrate it, think about it and reminisce on those times, I think those are the moments that you can really kind of sit in and be like, dang, we did it.”
How to watch
Site: Gampel Pavilion, Storrs
Advertisement
Time/date: 7 p.m., Thursday
Team records: UConn 17-0 (8-0), Villanova 14-3 (7-1)
Series record: UConn leads 47-18
Last meeting: 82-54 UConn, March 9, 2025 at Mohegan Sun Arena
TV: FS1
Streaming: FOX Sports app
Radio: UConn Sports Network on FOX Sports 97.9
