MINNEAPOLIS — Connecticut has spent virtually three many years as essentially the most formidable menace in girls’s faculty 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 document 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 typically 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 Remaining 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, looking at reporters with red-rimmed eyes. “I’m clearly upset, pissed off and disenchanted.”
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 girls’s basketball historical past insisted he was pleased with his group for making it this far.
Auriemma went by way of the laundry checklist of hurdles the Huskies had overcome through the season — most of them associated to staying wholesome — and added that ahead Olivia Nelson-Ododa had performed with an harm sustained in Friday’s sport towards Stanford, and that freshman guard Azzi Fudd had fallen sick in a single day and hadn’t gone to shootaround.
The group actually confronted loads of adversity. Most notable amongst its varied setbacks was Bueckers’ midseason knee harm, which contributed to the Huskies’ worst common season in 17 years.
Even that harm, 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 Remaining 4 defeats, the one which alerts the top of an period?
“It’s one other reminder of how arduous it’s to win right here,” Auriemma mentioned. “Normally the higher group wins whenever you get right here, and we simply weren’t ok.”
Listening to Auriemma say that it’s arduous to win can sound virtually unbelievable, contemplating how straightforward he has made it search for the previous three many years. Connecticut has lengthy had the higher group 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 might have begun to recede, however the stretch and not using a title can also be a testomony to the expansion of applications 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, in contrast to in 2017, the Gamecocks needed to undergo the Huskies to win this championship.
“Plenty 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 sport. “I believe the folks up at UConn deal with their girls’s basketball group as a sport. They’re compelled to due to all of the profitable and all of the success, however you possibly can take a web page out of their e book.”
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 dangerous breaks — maybe all three causes are legitimate — Auriemma is optimistic that his younger group could have a lot to supply subsequent season.
“I like our probabilities,” 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.”
