FITNESS EDGE
Fudd’s goal is to be healthy for sophomore season
WEST HARTFORD — Azzi Fudd is, almost literally, tip-toeing toward her sophomore season with the UConn women’s basketball team.
“Not only am I looking forward to playing healthy next season, but my next three seasons here, and I want to play professionally afterward,” Fudd said last week at coach Geno Auriemma’s golf event. “Pushing myself now … is not worth risking my body for the next few seasons.”
Fudd, 19, had a disrupted experience last season as a freshman, playing 25 of UConn’s 36 games. The foot injury that sidelined her, and limited her even while she was playing and playing quite well, isn’t quite healed.
So she isn’t going to push and rush through summer workouts the way she did leading up to her UConn arrival.
“I learned my lesson,” Fudd said. “I’m trying to be mature about this and take the time I need and not do too much, but make sure I’m doing enough to stay in shape.”
Fudd described her lingering foot issue as “a bone, a joint,” and said she played through varying degrees of pain last season. She was spectacular at times and a non-factor at others. Overall, she averaged 12.1 points and 27.9 minutes, shooting 45.7 percent from the field and 43 percent on 3-pointers.
After sitting out all of December and most of January, she scored 64 points in a three-game stretch, shooting 23-for-41. She also scored in double figures in three consecutive NCAA Tournament games — combining for 48 against Central Florida, Indiana and NC State — before struggling at the Final Four.
In a semifinal victory over Stanford, Fudd scored eight points in 27 minutes on 2-for-8 shooting. She came down with an illness the next day and was held to three points, making one shot, in the Huskies’ championship game loss to South Carolina.
“It was a roller coaster but I see a lot of positives, that being my first year,” Fudd said. “Obviously
there are a lot of things I would like to improve on. We didn’t finish the season the way we wanted to. But I thought there were a lot of positives along the way.
“It was tough, physically, especially with the injuries. But I learned a lot, mentally, about myself as a player, as a teammate. When I think about next year, I’m just really excited because of the growth I made this past year. Not that this year will be easier, but I’ll be a lot more comfortable.”
Beyond saying she’d like to become a better defensive player, Fudd said there are no specific offseason goals other than making sure she is 100 percent healthy for the start of practice in the fall.
The national high school Gatorade Player of the Year as a sophomore, Fudd tore the ACL and MCL in her right knee after her sophomore season at St. John’s
College High School, and lost most of her junior and seniors seasons to rehabilitation and limited scheduling brought on by the pandemic.
Still, she was the consensus No. 1 recruit in her high school class, one of the most hyped prospects in recent history, and has several high-level name, image and likeness contracts — including with Steph Curry’s SC30 Inc.
Fudd and several teammates attended the Warriors games against the Celtics in the NBA finals, chatting with Curry and other players while on site and watching them close out a championship.
“It was really cool because the whole team and the whole family was so happy and so proud of him,” Fudd said of Curry. “At the same time, it stung a little bit because we lost in the championship, so it was a little more fuel for the fire of, this is how we want to feel next year. Come next season, we want to be in
their position, winning it all.”
Paige Bueckers was among the teammates with her for those games. She told Draymond Green that he was expected to attend a UConn game next season.
“They argued that Storrs was pretty hard to get into, but I’m sure they can find a way,” Bueckers said. “I talked to Steph, Draymond, Klay (Thompson). I want those guys to get to a game, for sure.”
Bueckers and Fudd have been friends for years. Bueckers announced her commitment to UConn in April 2019 and spent much of the next year trying to convince Fudd to do the same. Fudd announced in Nov. 2020 that she, too, would attend UConn.
“Azzi’s good,” Bueckers said. “I think, obviously, last year she was fighting her foot thing throughout the whole season. So just for her to be healthy, she’s a lot more confident when she’s healthy. She stops thinking so much. This has been a good summer for her. She’s really starting to get back into who we all know she is.”
Fudd has taken a careful approach to workouts, sometimes working with the team as a whole, sometimes limiting herself to individual work.
“There’s no real timeline,” Fudd said. “It’s just kind of how I’m feeling. My goal is to start off the year healthy. … It’s been a little frustrating because it’s kind of been a lot of time and there’s nothing I can do to speed up the process, and I hate having to wait for this kind of stuff. It’s going slow, but it’s picking up, so I’m really happy and feeling good so far. Knock on wood. First step, for sure, will be just to be healthy and be able to play. Obviously there will be aches and pains, but being able to play without real limiting factors.”