NEW YORK — As the UConn women’s basketball team went through its shootaround at Barclays Center on Friday ahead of its game in the Women’s Champions Classic, Azzi Fudd felt a flash of deja vu.
The Huskies were practicing a simple action, Fudd navigating over a post player’s screen as her defensive assignment cut from the corner towards the top of the arc looking for an open 3-pointer. Immediately, the star guard recalled the last time she ran that play on the court in Brooklyn, in last year’s Women’s Champions Classic when UConn faced Louisville. After scoring 18 points in the Huskies’ 85-52 win, Fudd collided awkwardly with the screening forward and twisted her right knee early in the third quarter, suffering a sprain that sidelined her for the rest of the night plus the next three games.
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At the time, the minor setback felt devastating. The Louisville game was just Fudd’s fifth since returning from an ACL and lateral meniscus tear that ended her 2023-24 season after just two games. It was the fourth time in four years she was forced to miss time midseason due to an injury.
And though that moment of fear and frustration passed through Fudd’s mind as the No. 1 Huskies returned to the Women’s Champions Classic on Saturday to face No. 11 Iowa, that was all it did — pass through.
“It crossed my mind, but it wasn’t a lingering thought, just in and out,” Fudd said after UConn’s 90-64 rout of the Hawkeyes. “I think just having the confidence of my teammates and coaches no matter what, when I can’t find that confidence in myself and start to question things, having them in my ear giving me that motivation helps so much.”
That mindset translated on the court, too. Fudd had a dismal first half against the Hawkeyes, scoring just six points shooting 33% from the field and 0-for-3 on 3-pointers. It was the kind of start that once would have shaken her confidence, would have made her more hesitant in the second half.
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Instead, she let it pass. Two more more missed 3-pointers in the third quarter passed too. And then came the explosion.
Fudd sank her first 3-pointer of the game five minutes into in the third and immediately went on a solo 8-0 run that broke open the Huskies’ first 20-point lead of the game. She hit four more shots from the perimeter before the final buzzer, finishing with 21 points after halftime for a team-high 27.
“There’s nothing you can say. I say the same thing to her all the time, just, ‘Are you gonna make any of them? I just want to be prepared,’” coach Geno Auriemma joked postgame. “But I never tell her don’t shoot or stop shooting.”
Auriemma never questioned that Fudd’s offense would eventually arrive. It was a matter of when, not if. UConn led by just 11 points in the first half, then outscored Iowa by 17 while the star guard was on the court in the second.
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“Azzi can do two things: Azzi can give you a big lead that might be insurmountable, or Azzi can put a game away,” Auriemma said. “Today she didn’t give us the big lead, because she got nothing but open shots and missed them … It wasn’t a typical Azzi Fudd day, and that’s okay … You just gotta wait for the explosion to come, because you know it’s coming. If it’s coming at the beginning, coming at the middle or coming at the end, it doesn’t really matter.”
It was a year ago to the day that Fudd returned to the court from the knee sprain in the Huskies’ Dec. 21, 2024 loss to USC. She played just eight minutes shooting 0-for-4, and it would be weeks into the new year before Fudd began to look like herself again.
Now, with UConn out to a 12-0 start, Fudd will enter the second half of the 2025-26 season averaging career numbers in every category. She leads the Huskies in scoring with 18.5 points per game shooting 49.4% from the field, 50.6% from beyond the arc and 100% at the free throw line. She has also nearly doubled her assists from last season with three per game on top of a career-best 2.3 steals and 2.9 rebounds. She’s on pace to break UConn’s single season record for 3-point percentage on 6.8 attempts per game.
But maybe the most important stat of all is her games played: 12. For the first time in five years at UConn, the star guard hasn’t missed a single game headed into the holiday break. And no one, not even Fudd, truly knows how good she can be at full capacity.
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“I think the adversity I’ve been through has taught me a lot about just how strong I am,” Fudd said before the season began at Big East Media Day. “As an athlete, it’s easy to get caught in the highs and the lows, so being able to reflect and be like, look at all that I’ve overcome. I should have all the confidence in the world.”
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