Azzi Fudd’s family couldn’t quite believe it when she told them that she had torn her ACL and would miss the rest of the season for UConn basketball.

“I was in a state of devastation for her,” her father Tim Fudd told CT Insider. “She’s worked so hard to get herself right and to have this now happen again, it’s like, ‘Dang, like, she has worst luck with stuff in this.’

“We felt like she had gotten over these stupid injuries and like all of a sudden, she calls and it’s like, ‘Oh my gosh. What is it? Why does this keep happening?’”

Fudd tore the ACL and meniscus in her right knee during practice on Nov. 14. So after playing just two games for the Huskies, Fudd will miss the remainder of the 2023-24 season.

The No. 1 recruit in the class of 2021, Fudd has struggled with injuries throughout her three years at UConn. A foot injury in her freshman season kept her out of 11 games, and a knee injury last season had her absent from 22 games.

And Fudd is not the only UConn player to struggle with injuries over the last two seasons. Paige Bueckers tore her ACL and missed her junior season before returning for the 2023-24 campaign. Freshman Ice Brady also missed last season with an injury. And that’s not accounting for the time missed by other players throughout last season; at one point, UConn had to postpone a game due to a lack of available players.

And with Fudd and Jana El Alfy out for this season, the injuries have raised questions about the Huskies’ support staff. WNBA star Diamond DeShields posted on social media after Fudd’s injury: “Who the strength coach there …? Cuz WTF.”

But Tim Fudd quickly came to the defense of Andrea Hudy, the director of sports performance for UConn women’s basketball.

“It has nothing to do with the strength coach,” he tweeted Friday. “She is actually really good. These injuries are the flukiest things I’ve ever seen. Things have occurred that you would see in some rare occasions.”

Hudy and the UConn staff have been focusing on limiting injury risks through different pre-rehabilitation workouts and data studies on each individual athlete. The Fudds met up with Hudy in the Cayman Islands to discuss how best to help Azzi moving forward.

“You can’t control every scenario, right?” Azzi’s mother Katie Fudd told CT Insider. “You can prepare their bodies but there’s nothing you can do to manipulate situations to keep everyone safe but there’s nothing you can do to manipulate situations to keep everyone safe and healthy. You know, it’s kind of like driving down the street. You might be the best driver in the world, but you can’t control a bad driver, right?

“She (Azzi) really likes Hudy and really trusts her. And we do too. I think she’s taking the time to get to know us and let us get to know her a little bit so that we have that trust and respect. And we’re confident that they’re gonna get her where she needs to be. I don’t have any doubts about that.”

Azzi Fudd will miss the rest of the season for UConn basketball with ACL and meniscal tears in her right knee.

The junior guard played two games to start the Huskies’ season before suffering the noncontact knee injury during practice on Nov. 14. Fudd will have surgery at UConn Health at a later date, the program announced in a news release.

“We’re all just so upset for Azzi,” head coach Geno Auriemma said in a statement. “She worked hard to be healthy for this season, and it’s unfortunate when you put in a lot of hard work and have a setback like this.”

After Fudd’s sophomore season at St. John’s College High School (D.C.), she tore the ACL and MCL in her right knee while playing in a U-18 tournament with USA Basketball.

Over her first two college seasons, Fudd has been in and out of the Huskies’ lineup with injuries. She missed two months due to a foot injury in her freshman season, though she averaged 12.1 points in the 25 games she did play. She dealt with multiple knee injuries during her sophomore season, averaging 15.1 points in just 15 games.

While Fudd entered her junior season with high hopes, she played in just two games before suffering her latest knee injury. UConn has won two games without her in the lineup and will have to navigate the rest of the 2023-24 season without her.

“Azzi loves the game and works tirelessly,” Auriemma said. “I’m confident she’ll rehab with the same work ethic and come back better than ever. We’ll obviously miss her presence on the court, but Azzi will continue to be a great teammate and important part of this team this season. Our program will support Azzi through her recovery however we can.”

No. 6 UConn (3-1) will face No. 2 UCLA (4-0) in its next game at 7:30 p.m. ET Friday.

UConn’s Paige Bueckers grew up watching basketball in her home state of Minnesota. She has memories of Lynx and Golden Gophers games at Williams Arena — she attended those games starting when she was 10 or 12 years old.

Now, Bueckers will return to The Barn, but not as a spectator.

“It’s super surreal because I grew up going to games at The Barn and watching the Gophers and watching the Lynx play there,” Bueckers said to the Hartford Courant. “So to be playing there, where I grew up, my childhood, at my dream school wearing a UConn jersey in that arena, it’s like a surreal feeling for me.”

The Huskies are set to take on the Gophers in Minnesota at 5 p.m. ET Sunday in a homecoming game for Bueckers. Bueckers will be taking the same court her childhood idols took over a decade ago.

“I envisioned it when I was younger,” Bueckers said. “Just wanting to be the people who were playing on the court. As a young kid, that was where I wanted to be. You never knew what the future was going to hold, but it was something I aspired to do.”

UConn’s head coach Geno Auriemma goes out of his way to schedule homecoming games for his seniors, including two international matchups this season — one for Nika Mühl in Croatia during the Huskies’ preseason tour and one for Aaliyah Edwards in Toronto, which will be played in December.

Williams Arena is likely to be packed when the local star makes her return — more than 10,000 seats are expected to be filled when Bueckers takes the court at the 14,625-seat arena.

Among those 10,000 people will be Bueckers’ family, friends and other Minnesotans in the basketball community. And Bueckers credits these people with her upbringing.

“You often hear the phrase ‘Minnesota nice,’” Bueckers told CT Insider. “I think everything around here, just everybody knows everybody. Everybody’s nice to each other. Everybody’s like family once you meet them. So, I think that just is sort of why I love relationships, why I love people so much and why I love getting to know people so much and I think that has a lot to do with where I’m from.”

But for Bueckers, a homecoming game isn’t just about seeing family and friends. It’s about being who Rebekkah Brunson and Lindsey Whalen were to her for other young girls.

“I want to be an inspiration to kids,” Bueckers said. “I want people to see that injuries happen, adversity happens, but what do you do to come back from it? How hard do you attack that process? I want people to see passion when they see me play, fire and energy and that I love the game.”

UConn basketball dropped six spots to No. 8 in Monday’s edition of the AP Top 25 poll. But star guard Paige Bueckers isn’t worried about the rankings.

The Huskies’ fall from the No. 2 ranking came after Sunday’s 92-81 loss to then-unranked NC State. The defeat to the Wolfpack stood out in several ways:

  • UConn has not started a season with a 1-1 record since 2014.
  • UConn had not lost to NC State since the 1998 Elite Eight.
  • UConn had not allowed 92 points in regulation since 2001.
  • UConn has six ranked losses against unranked opponents over the last three seasons, compared to four in the 20 seasons before that.

Even after the loss, though, UConn did make some positive history. The Huskies’ presence in the AP Top 25 poll breaks the record for most consecutive weeks as a ranked team at 566, surpassing Tennessee at 565.

Yet as Bueckers said ahead of the NC State game, she is not paying attention to the ups and downs of her team’s ranking this season. She only cares about one metric: an NCAA championship.

“We only care about being No. 1 in April, and we have yet to do that since we’ve been here at school,” Bueckers said. “So rankings during the regular season really don’t mean anything to us.”

The most recent of UConn’s 11 national titles came in 2016. Bueckers joined the Huskies in 2020, and she wants to win her own before her time with the program is up, whenever that may be.

“It’s about getting better every single day at practice, building great habits and continuing to get better on both sides of the floor, communicate, hold each other accountable,” Bueckers said. “And I think those are the main goals in order to build habits to be the No. 1 team in April.”

No. 2 UConn basketball was upset by an unranked NC State team on Saturday evening, 92-81. The last time the Wolfpack beat the Huskies came in the 1998 Elite Eight.

NC State junior Saniya Rivers stood out as the player of the match, draining 33 points and grabbing 11 rebounds for her squad. Rivers also drew fouls throughout the game, and she shot 10-14 from the free-throw line.

UConn head coach Gino Auriemma told his NC State counterpart Wes Moore that the Wolfpack team is “10 times better than last year,” as CT Insider’s Maggie Vanoni reported after the game.

“Everything they did was better than ours. … They were just on top of their game more than I remember. We got our asses beat plain and simple,” Auriemma said.

The Huskies made a palpable offensive effort, with two of their starters bagging over 20 points — Paige Bueckers dropped 27, while Aaliyah Edwards contributed 21. Bueckers was playing in her second game since her return from an ACL injury.

However, UConn struggled on the defensive end of the court. Four out of five Husky starters were in foul trouble by the end of the game, racking up at least four fouls, with Nika Mühl fouling out.

“We weren’t mature enough to handle it,” Auriemma said of his team.

UConn grabbed 11 fewer rebounds than NC State, with 29 to the Wolfpack’s 41. NC State cashed in on 12 points off rebounds and 12 second-chance points.

“We’ve got a sh— attitude towards rebounding … and that’s got to change,” Auriemma said.

With UConn’s loss to NC State and No. 1 LSU’s season-opening loss to Colorado, the top two teams in the preseason AP Top 25 have lost before the second AP poll for the first time in at least 25 years, according to ESPN.

Paige Bueckers is back, even if she had what she considers to be a bad game.

For the first time in 584 days, Bueckers played for UConn basketball in the Huskies’ season-opening 102-58 win over Dayton. After missing last season with an ACL injury, the redshirt junior notched 8 points on 3-for-9 shooting, as well as 7 rebounds, 4 assists and 1 steal.

“In my opinion it was a bad game for me,” Bueckers said. “But I’m grateful to have a bad game right now.

“I’m still learning how to give myself grace. I’m not ignorant enough to think that it’s going to be a linear trajectory this whole time. I’m super grateful in the fact that I get to go try again on Sunday and be even better on Sunday.”

Bueckers played just 21 minutes in her first game back, and she sat on the bench for the entire fourth quarter. But the 21 minutes were still an increase from the 11 she played in a Saturday exhibition game.

“There’s a medical minute restriction and then there’s my restriction. And she’s not gonna like mine,” head coach Geno Auriemma said. “She’s so anxious to play, she wants to be out there and she wants to do everything, be everywhere and do everything.”

There is a level of leadership, Auriemma said, that the team requires from her. But he understands that Bueckers is anxious to get back to her old self.

“She’s so far ahead of herself. She wants to get it all back on each possession,” he said, noting that she was trying to do everything. But the depth of UConn’s bench helps Bueckers to not carry the entire load.

“We know that as a team, we have a lot of weapons, and it’s not a one-man team where somebody has to carry more of the load than others,” she added. “It’s a very equal and well-balanced team.”

Ahead of Paige Bueckers’ official return from her ACL injury, the UConn basketball star gave credit to late NBA star Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gigi.

On Tuesday, Bueckers wore a shirt reading: “If you think you can’t, UConn.” The quote is attributed to noted UConn fan Gigi Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash alongside her father and seven others in January 2020.

The Huskies first wore the warmup shirts with the quote, which comes from a letter Bryant wrote to the team after a loss, back in January 2021.

Ahead of UConn’s season opener Wednesday against Dayton, Bueckers shared how Kobe Bryant’s “Mamba Mentality” helped her as she rehabbed the ACL injury that kept her out all of last season. Speaking with ESPN, she said that she read Bryant’s book, which helped her as she navigated the injury and rehabilitation process.

Kobe’s “mentality, his approach, just how much he dedicated his life to the game” helped her through that time, Bueckers said.

“When this injury first happened, I thought a lot about Kobe,” she said. “I read ‘The Mamba Mentality’ book. And he just looked at his injury as another way to prove people wrong and as another thing to accomplish. I mean, Kobe loved challenges, so anything that he could face, that people had doubts that he could overcome, is what made him want to do it even more.”

The 22-year-old guard also turned to her UConn teammates, and to other athlete’s successful returns from ACL injuries, to inspire her.

“A lot of my teammates have gone through ACL injuries, have gone through major injuries,” she said. “I watched, in the WNBA, in the NBA, in the NFL, people coming back from ACL injuries. Klay Thompson came back from two major injuries to win a NBA championship.

“I see inspiration around me every day with my teammates and just be able to lean on them and ask some questions and ask how their process went. There was a lot of things that kept me going.”

Paige Bueckers missed the entire 2022-23 college basketball season with an ACL injury. And as she prepares for her return to the court for UConn, she also is looking back on her lost year.

The 22-year-old redshirt junior spoke with “SportsCenter” about the emotional toll of the injury.

“The hardest moment definitely would be sitting in that waiting room after my MRI, the doctors telling me I tore my ACL,” she told ESPN’s Alexa Philippou.

Bueckers is good at internalizing her emotions, and she didn’t want to be a burden on her teammates, she said. But when describing those emotions to Philippou, including how she tried both to grapple with them and to be a good teammate at the same time, Bueckers teared up.

“Hiding my emotions was definitely hard,” she said. “It just hurt so bad not being able to go out there, especially with all of the stuff we were going through as a team. But I think the biggest thing for me was coming in every day and making sure that nobody saw the dark times, the sad times I was going through.

“As a team leader I was just trying to do everything I could to have a positive attitude about everything and make sure that every time I came into the gym, every time I came to practice, every time I came to rehab I had a great attitude, I had a smile on my face.”

And even after enduring the hard times, Bueckers wouldn’t change her path.

“I wouldn’t trade my life for the world, I know that everything I went through up to this point has shaped me to be who I am as a person and as a player,” she said. “If I didn’t go through some of the things I went through, I wouldn’t be who I am. The story I want is just the story of overcoming adversity.

“Obviously I wish there could have been no injuries, but it’s just a part of my story and a part of my journey in life. But definitely hoping to make the most of the time I have left here.”

Bueckers made her unofficial return to the court in an exhibition game Saturday against Southern Connecticut State, but she and the Huskies officially will start their season at 7 p.m. ET Wednesday against Dayton.

UConn’s roster continues to work its way back to full strength, with Ice Brady set to make her debut for the Huskies after missing her entire freshman season with a dislocated kneecap.

Brady entered her freshman year as the fifth-ranked recruit in the nation, and buzz is building around her return, especially as the Huskies look to fill out their frontcourt.

“Now don’t get me wrong, she hasn’t played college basketball and there’s some issues that are going to rise and all that,” UConn head coach Geno Auriemma told CT Insider. “But anytime a kid can make shots from the perimeter, score in the lane, (is a) really good passer; she just has that kind of game.”

Had Brady been healthy, she likely would have started her freshman season competing for minutes off the bench. But she would have been a big boost in an injury-riddled year for the Huskies.

“Ice is a great player. I was so excited for her to play last year so this year I’m even more excited,” Azzi Fudd said. “… She’d always be worried about what this year would look like for her, and I would tell her, ‘You’re gonna be the same player if not better than when you got hurt.’”

The injury helped Brady become closer with star guard Paige Bueckers, who missed the season with a torn ACL. With the return of the 2021 National Player of the year grabbing headlines, Brady has “flown under the radar,” Bueckers said.

But Fudd, who was Brady’s roommate all of last year, says the redshirt freshman has come back “better than I remember.”

UConn women’s basketball’s injury woes continue, with redshirt freshman Jana El Alfy injuring her Achilles tendon, the Egyptian Basketball Federation announced Monday.

El Alfy was starring for Egypt’s youth national team at the FIBA U19 World Cup in Madrid. She led the tournament with 21.4 points per game before the injury, as well as leading Egypt with 11.0 rebounds and 50.5% field goal shooting.

In Sunday’s game against Italy, El Alfy went down halfway through the second quarter on a noncontact injury. She was later escorted off the court in a wheelchair.

“Jana (El Alfy) left the match stadium immediately and went to a hospital near the stadium to undergo immediate X-rays in the presence of Yasmine Al-Kilani, the team doctor,” the Egyptian Basketball Federation said in a news release translated from Arabic to English via Google Translate. “And Yasmine Al-Kilani confirmed that after conducting the necessary medical examinations for Jana (El Alfy), it was confirmed that she had a complete cut in the Achilles tendon.”

The national federation and its team doctors “coordinated” with UConn to discuss the injury and next steps, and El Alfy is set to have surgery in the United States, per the news release.

While UConn has yet to release details on El Alfy, her injury represents the latest in a string of injuries for the program.

Paige Bueckers and Ice Brady missed all of last season due to injuries suffered last offseason, and Azzi Fudd missed most of the season with knee injuries. While all three players should be back in action for the 2023-24 season, El Alfy’s injury still is a blow to the Huskies.