For the first time since the departure of the 2004 recruiting class, UConn basketball will graduate a senior class that has never won a national championship. Following three straight trips to the Final Four, UConn’s season, like everyone else’s, was cut short with the cancellation of the NCAA tournament.

When Crystal Dangerfield, the nation’s fourth-ranked recruit, teamed up with Molly Bent and Kyla Irwin to sign with Geno Auriemma and UConn back in 2016, the class ranked 14th in the country. (For reference, both UConn’s 2015 and 2017 classes ranked third.) UConn had won the last four national titles and 75 consecutive games when Dangerfield, Bent and Irwin showed up at Gampel Pavilion. (The similarity to the group that arrived in the fall of 2004 is poignant; at that time, UConn was coming off three consecutive national championships.)

Following the departure of that trophy-less 2004 class in 2008, UConn claimed six of the next eight national championships, as first Maya Moore and then Breanna Stewart carried the Huskies to multiple undefeated seasons. Now, UConn fans — and UConn fans alone — are hoping another top recruit can bring them back to dominance.

“You know how many religions there are in the world?” Auriemma recently joked. “The one religion in women’s college basketball is praying that UConn loses.”

The impending arrival of Paige Bueckers should trigger an upswing in prayers from those devoted to hating the Huskies. The top ranked recruit in her class and the Gatorade National Player of the Year is already being looked at as the future of the program, if not the sport altogether.

And it’s not just fans who are riding the hype. According to UConn coach Geno Auriemma, by the end of next year, “I am going to be saying, ‘You know what? We wouldn’t have won the national championship without her.’”

Yup, Bueckers is that good. Her profile on espnW’s Hoopgurlz makes it sound like she was created in a basketball lab: a “skilled combo-guard” who “delivers offensive production off the dribble,” Bueckers is “effortless and poised in the back court,” “finds the rim with regularity,” and brings a “dose of swagger” and “scorer’s mentality” to the backcourt.

She’s already an internet celebrity, with dozens of YouTube videos documenting her high school exploits. And with over 400,000 followers on Instagram, she’s a superstar built for the digital age.

Auriemma has said that the only player to ever show up to the first day of practice as a polished player was Maya Moore. Even Breanna Stewart struggled at times in her first season. Of course, the Breanna Stewart Era ended with four national championships and an unworldly 151-5 record — but four of those losses came in her freshman season.

Bueckers will have her struggles as well, but like Stewart, we shouldn’t expect them to last.

“By herself, she can’t win anything,” Auriemma has said. “But with the people I think we are going to surround her with, I think we can do great things.”

Bueckers will be joined by 21st- and 26th- ranked Aaliyah Edwards and Mir McLean, both wings, while Auriemma will also welcome Nika Muhl and Piath Gabriel, a pair of international recruits.

Stewart was not without help herself. Moriah Jefferson was the second-ranked player in the class, and the third member was five-star Morgan Tuck. As you might imagine, the class was ranked first overall, and they graduated as the winningest group in college basketball history, the only recruiting class to ever win four national titles.

In that 2016 title run, UConn throttled Mississippi State 98-38 in the NCAA Tournament, prompting a heated and pointless national discussion about whether UConn’s dominance was bad for the sport.

The answer was always no, but whatever the case, UConn has been significantly less dominant since that tournament run. A year after that 98-38 win, Mississippi State beat UConn in overtime to advance to the national championship game. UConn has subsequently stalled in the Final Four each of the last three seasons.

On one hand, UConn is leaving the American Athletic Conference with a perfect 139-0 record (they’ll rejoin the Big East next year). On the other, this is UConn: the only wins that matter are championships, and there haven’t been any of those since 2016. This year, all three of UConn’s losses came at the hands of would-be first seeds, putting into doubt their chances of breaking their dry spell, even if the tournament hadn’t been cancelled. None of the losses were especially close, with a 74-56 defeat to Oregon marking the program’s worst home defeat in 15 years.

Is UConn in a rut? Not by any objective standard (they’re 135-8 over the last four years, after all). But the Huskies have clearly been falling short of their own expectations. Enter Paige Bueckers.

Even with the expected freshman year growing pains, there are two specific aspects of Bueckers’ play that should translate to the collegiate game right away: her guard play and her swagger.

At the end of the 2016 season, when Stewart celebrated a 38-0 record, her team led all 344 Division I programs in 11 major statistical categories and were top-10 in nine more. Most importantly, UConn paced the country in assists, assists per game and assist to turnover ratio.

Bueckers has incredible vision and the talent to put the ball where she wants it. In high school, she has averaged 9.4 assists per game, good for fifth in the country, and has led Hopkins High School in Minnetonka, Minnesota to a 30-0 record. She’ll make an already talented UConn squad surrounding her even better.

Paige had the WHOLE GYM guessing ???? @paigebueckers1 pic.twitter.com/1oXiux0SYa

— Overtime (@overtime) December 4, 2019

The impact of Bueckers’ confidence is more difficult to quantify. It can be seen in a video posted to her own Instagram, in which Bueckers confidently says that her defender “can’t guard me.” It can be seen in her full-court passes and her pull-up jumpers. It can be seen in her decision to sign with UConn, the most storied program in the sport.

No one player can guarantee a national championship. But with Auriemma, who turned 66 in March, saying he could see himself coaching another five years, UConn is on a path to regain their throne. The success of South Carolina in year one with their top-ranked freshman class speaks to the impact of a strong, cohesive group, no matter their age.

UConn is used to winning. For most of this decade, that is all they have done. Next year, Bueckers will see if she can inaugurate a new decade as successful as the last.

After an illustrious career for both club and country, Gotham FC and U.S. Women’s National Team defender Kelley O’Hara announced today via Kelley on the Street that she will be retiring from professional soccer at the end of this year, making the 2024 NWSL season her last.

"I have always said I would play under two conditions: that I still love playing soccer, and if my body would let me do it the way I wanted to," O’Hara told Just Women’s Sports in the lead-up to her retirement announcement. "I realized a while back that I was always going to love it, so it was the physical piece that was going to be the deciding factor."

The 35-year-old will retire as a two-time World Cup champion, an Olympic gold medalist, and at least a two-time NWSL champion, depending on where Gotham finishes this season. Her legacy as a player is hard to fully encapsulate, and will forever run through some of the biggest snapshots in USWNT and NWSL history. 

In 2012, O’Hara played every minute of the USWNT’s Olympic gold medal run, after having recently converted into a defender. Her soaring goal off the bench in the 2015 World Cup semifinal is the stuff of legend. And her return from lingering injury to play in every knockout match of the national team’s 2019 World Cup win cemented a storybook international career. 

It was O’Hara who scored the overtime goal in 2021 to earn the Washington Spirit their first-ever NWSL championship, and O’Hara who returned to help see Gotham earn a title in 2023 after years spent in the trenches with the club’s previous iteration, Sky Blue. Her 15-year career spanned two professional women’s soccer leagues in the U.S. (she earned her first professional title in 2010 with WPS’s FC Gold Pride), as well as sweeping changes to the sport both on and off the pitch.

On the field, O’Hara has always been known for a motor that never quits, making the right flank her domain in attacking possession and defensive transition. In recent years, she’s also been celebrated for a competitive fire that raises the level of her teammates, whether she’s in the starting XI or supporting from the bench.

But injuries take a toll, a reality not always seen by the fans watching from home. "I've never taken anything for granted, and I feel like I've never coasted either," O’Hara said of her late-career success in the NWSL despite battling injuries. "I've always been like, 'I gotta put my best foot forward every single day I step on this field' — which is honestly probably half the reason why I'm having to retire now as opposed to getting a couple more years out of it. I've just grinded hard."

Recently, O’Hara has been sidelined at Gotham with ankle and knee injuries, and the situation motivated her to really prioritize listening to her body. "To get injured and come back, and get injured and come back, and just keep doing it, it really takes a toll on you.

"People don't see the doubt that's associated with injury,” she continued. "As athletes we feel a certain way, we perform a certain way, our body feels a certain way, we're very in tune with our bodies. And there's always so much doubt surrounding injury. It’s like, 'Can I feel the way I felt before?' The reality is sometimes you don't."

O’Hara didn’t arrive at the decision to move on from her playing career lightly. But once she began seriously considering making 2024 her final year during the last NWSL offseason, it felt right. "Once I was like, 'Alright, you know what, this will be my last year,' I have had a lot of peace with it," she said. "Truly the only thing I felt was gratitude for everything that my career has been, all the things I've been able to do and the people I've been able to do it with."

She said she’ll miss daily interactions with her teammates and all the amazing memories they’ve created, though she feels lucky to have formed relationships that go beyond sharing a locker room. "You're basically getting to hang out and just shoot the shit with your best friends every day," she reflected. "Which is so unheard of, and I just feel very lucky to do it for so long."

The Stanford graduate also mentioned that the NWSL’s suspension of regular season play in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic made her realize how much playing allowed her the space to simply be creative every day. The tactical elements of soccer provided O’Hara an outlet for problem solving and made use of her naturally competitive edge.

She’s now gearing up to channel her on-field intensity into her post-playing career full time, which is a new chapter she’s excited to begin. "I don't know if the world's ready for it, like the fact that I'm not going to be putting all of my energy into football all the time," she said with a laugh. 

O’Hara said she would like to stay connected to the game in some fashion, whether it be as an owner, coach, or member of a front office. She’s also interested in the growing media space surrounding women’s sports, having provided on-camera analysis for broadcasters like CBS Sports in addition to starting a production company with her fiancée.

"I just feel like I have a lot of passions, and things that excite me," she says. "And I do want to stay as close as I can to the game, because I feel a responsibility — and I'm not sure in what capacity — to continue to grow it."

A sense of responsibility to grow the game has been a consistent refrain for the USWNT and NWSL players of O’Hara’s era, who ushered in a new age of equal pay for the national team and collectively bargained protections for those in the league. The landscape for new players looks different than it did 14 years ago, in large part due to this pivotal generation.

"I feel an immense sense of pride around that, because I don't know if any of us knew that was gonna happen," she said. "We kind of, as things unfolded, took the next step towards changing what women's football looks like in this country and around the world.

"I'm really grateful to have been part of this era with the players that I was [with], not backing down and pushing and knowing that was the right thing to do."

Whatever the future holds, O’Hara is going ahead full throttle. It’s a piece of advice she’d also give to the next generation of professionals looking to make their own impact.

"Whatever you do in life, do it because you love it, and the chips will fall in place," she said. "If you love something, you're willing to do what it takes. You're willing to make the sacrifices, you're willing to handle the roller coaster.

"To me, it's simple. Don't do it for any other reason but that, and I think you'll be alright."

The Phoenix Mercury center spoke with Robin Roberts about her 10-month incarceration, reflecting on her poor living conditions and shaky mental state ahead of her May 7th memoir.

"The mattress had a huge blood stain on it. I had no soap, no toilet paper," Griner told the ABC News anchor in last night’s 20/20 special. "That was the moment where I just felt less than a human." 

She also detailed some of her lowest moments during that time, saying with tears in her eyes that she went so far as to consider taking her own life on more than one occasion. However, the thought of Russian officials not releasing her body back to her family made her reconsider.

"I just didn't think I could get through what I needed to get through," said Griner.

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In February 2022, Griner was arrested and charged with drug possession and smuggling by a Russian court after Sheremetyevo International Airport police found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. The cartridges were prescribed by Griner’s doctor for chronic pain back in Arizona, where medical marijuana is legal. In the interview, the two-time Olympic gold medalist said she had a "mental lapse" while packing, and never intended to bring the cannabis products with her when she returned to play for UMMC Ekaterinburg.

"It's just so easy to have a mental lapse," Griner said. "Granted, my mental lapse was on a more grand scale. But it doesn't take away from how that can happen." 

She was later sentenced to nine years behind bars after her Russian attorneys advised her to plead guilty the following July. Griner was then sent to a remote penal colony where she was forced to spend her days cutting cloth to make military uniforms. From there, it only got worse.

"Honestly, it just had to happen," she said when asked about her decision to cut off her signature long locks. "We had spiders above my bed making nests.

"My dreads started to freeze," she added. "They would just stay wet and cold and I was getting sick. You've gotta do what you've gotta do to survive."

Shortly after Griner’s initial arrest, the U.S. State Department classified her case as wrongfully detained, escalating its urgency within the government and calling even more attention to the situation. On December 8th, she was freed in a prisoner exchange negotiated by the Biden administration.

While she told Roberts she was "thrilled" when she got the news, she was also very upset about having to leave fellow wrongful detainee Paul Whelan behind. She also continues to carry guilt about her arrest, saying "At the end of the day, it's my fault. And I let everybody down."

Griner’s memoir, Coming Home, hits shelves on May 7th.

"Coming Home begins in a land where my roots developed and is the diary of my heartaches and regrets," Griner told ABC News in an exclusive statement. "But, ultimately, the book is also a story of how my family, my faith, and the support of millions who rallied for my rescue helped me endure a nightmare."

Longtime USWNT fixture Carli Lloyd took to Instagram Wednesday morning to announce that she’s pregnant with her first child. 

"Baby Hollins coming in October 2024!" she wrote. The caption framed a collaged image of baby clothes, an ultrasound photo, and syringes indicating what she described as a "rollercoaster" fertility journey.

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In a Women’s Health story published in tandem with Lloyd’s post, the Fox Sports analyst and correspondent opened up about her struggles with infertility and the lengthy IVF treatments she kept hidden from the public eye.

"Soccer taught me how to work hard, persevere, be resilient, and never give up. I would do whatever it took to prepare, and usually when I prepared, I got results," Lloyd told Women’s Health’s Amanda Lucci. "But I found out that I didn’t know much about this world. I was very naive to think that we wouldn’t have any issues getting pregnant. And so it began."

Lloyd went on to discuss her road to pregnancy in great detail, sharing the highs and lows of the process and expressing gratitude for the care and support her family and medical team provided along the way. She rounded out the piece with a nod toward others navigating the same challenges, encouraging people to share their own pregnancy journeys, painful as they may be.

"My story is currently a happy one, but I know there are other women who are facing challenges in their pregnancy journey. I see you and I understand your pain," she said. "My hope is that more and more women will speak up about this topic, because their stories helped me. I also wish for more resources, funding, and education around fertility treatments. There is much to be done, and I hope I can play a role in helping."

The 41-year-old New Jersey native retired from professional soccer in 2021, closing out her decorated career with 316 international appearances, the second-most in USWNT history, in addition to 134 international goals. A legend on the field, Lloyd walked away from the game with two World Cups, two Olympic gold medals, and two FIFA Player of the Year awards.

On Tuesday, FIFPRO announced the launch of Project ACL, a three-year research initiative designed to address a steep uptick in ACL injuries across women's professional football.

Project ACL is a joint venture between FIFPRO, England’s Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA), Nike, and Leeds Beckett University. While the central case study will focus on England’s top-flight Women's Super League, the findings will be distributed around the world.

ACL tears are between two- and six-times more likely to occur in women footballers than men, according to The Guardian. And with both domestic and international programming on the rise for the women’s game, we’ve seen some of the sport's biggest names moved to the season-ending injury list with ACL-related knocks.

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Soccer superstars like Vivianne Miedema, Beth Mead, Catarina Macario, Marta, and England captain Leah Williamson have all struggled with their ACLs in recent years, though all have since returned to the field. In January, Chelsea and Australia forward Sam Kerr was herself sidelined with the injury, kicking off a year of similar cases across women’s professional leagues. And just yesterday, the Spirit announced defender Anna Heilferty would miss the rest of the NWSL season with a torn ACL. The news comes less than two weeks after Bay FC captain Alex Loera went down with the same injury. 

Project ACL will closely study players in the WSL, monitoring travel, training, and recovery practices to look for trends that could be used to prevent the injury in the future. Availability of sports science and medical resources within individual clubs will be taken into account throughout the process.

ACL injuries in women's football have long outpaced the same injury in the men's game, but resources for specialized prevention and treatment still lag behind. Investment in achieving a deeper, more specialized understanding of the problem should hopefully alleviate the issue both on and off the field.