When she arrived in the village of Storrs, she says, “We didn’t even know if we were going to have a season yet.” The team trained and socialized in a COVID bubble. “Me and that freshman class, I feel like they’re going to be my bridesmaids,” she says. (Not that she’s planning a wedding anytime soon. “I’m more just focused on basketball,” she says of her relationship status. Plus, she adds of dating, “It’s a crazy world out here.”)
The Huskies did have a season, and for Bueckers it was an explosive one. She put up 32 points against St. John’s and 14 assists against Butler; won Big East Player of the Year, AP Player of the Year, and Naismith College Player of the Year. “Paige Bueckers came into this space with a ton of hype, and, man, she outdelivered it immediately,” says ESPN anchor Elle Duncan.
At the 2021 ESPY Awards, the then 19-year-old was named the Best College Athlete of the year in women’s sports. Bueckers was, officially and suddenly, the face of women’s college basketball, and she had mixed feelings about it. “I want to shed a light on Black women,” she said as she received her award. “They don’t get the media coverage that they deserve. They’ve given so much to the sport, the community, and society as a whole, and their value is undeniable.”
The speech was met with a standing ovation, and the internet erupted with praise. “I was completely blown away,” Duncan says. Bob says he may or may not have cried. “I think it probably caught a lot of people by surprise, but it didn’t surprise me,” he says.
“I grew up with a lot of influential Black women in my life,” Bueckers tells me: her longtime AAU coach Tara Starks; her former stepmother (mom to her stepbrother, Randy, and half brother, Drew); countless teammates she’s played with over the years. “I feel like a lot of people shy away from having those conversations,” she says of her speech, “[but] to use my platform to do that, I thought was very important.”
Bueckers accepted her ESPY Award two months after undergoing ankle surgery to repair cartilage damage, assuming the minor setback would be the only one of her college career. Then a meniscus tear and a tibial plateau fracture in December 2021 saw her benched for 19 games during her sophomore season, and a torn ACL ruled her out for her entire junior year.
Fans everywhere grieved Bueckers’s injuries. “She was the transformational generational talent that was promised,” Duncan says. “And to see so much of that momentum stalled multiple times because of things that were not within her control was devastating.” But, according to Auriemma, Bueckers herself kept pity at bay. “Some kids, when they’re missing the thing they love the most, when that’s taken away from them, they have a tendency to feel sorry for themselves,” the coach says. “She was completely the opposite of that. I know that probably inside it was killing her. But never once did she show that.”
