The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Camara, Stevens to make Husky debuts in Italy
Azura Stevens walked off the court following a loss in the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament at the Greensboro Coliseum in early March of 2016. Batouly Camara experienced the same feeling in a lopsided NCAA tournament defeat less than three weeks later. Neither had any idea what the site of their next games would be.
As it turns out, it will be at Fonte Roma Eur in Rome against the national team from Netherlands on Monday when the UConn women’s basketball team plays the first of four exhibition games during its tour of Italy.
“Hopefully we can help the team,” said Camara, a transfer from Ken-
“My teammates give me confidence. I think I am smarter, I play better with the team and understand what I am trying to accomplish as well as being able to play fast.
“We were going to the coaches and talking to them and our teammates. We appreciate how much they did and we just wanted to be a part of that. We have the opportunity and we are looking forward to it.”
There were times when the 6-foot-6 Stevens looked like the best player in UConn’s practices a season ago, even though she was playing against first team AllAmericans Napheesa Collier, Katie Lou Samuelson and Gabby Williams, Canadian Olympic national team leading scorer Kia Nurse and current WNBA guard Saniya Chong. She will add some size to a UConn team that relied on undersized post players Collier and Williams a season ago.
“Being here has taught me a lot how to push myself to that next level,” Stevens said. “It is a work in progress definitely. I’m not anywhere near where I want to be, but knocking down shots when I am tired and little things that we work on every day in practice, we can only do that when you are matched up against (other great players).”
UConn has brought in transfers before but never one as established of a player as Stevens. If she had remained at Duke, she likely would have been a preseason All-American during the 2016-17 season and would be a potential lottery pick in next year’s WNBA Draft.
The chance to be pushed by a coach who was won a record 11 NCAA Division I women’s basketball national titles has brought her to UConn.
“I think last year was good just to get used to what they are doing,” Stevens said. “I just tried to have a positive mindset about everything. Obviously I didn’t want to sit out for a year, but I just tried my hardest to take advantage of the time. The season was good in helping us with our transition.”
It remains to be seen how Stevens and Camara fit in on the basketball court, but it didn’t take them long to be accepted into the fold by the UConn players.
“Transfers and transferring is always a hard process, those two had a great outlook on the process itself,” Nurse said. “They had a great outlook on fitting in and understanding this is somebody’s personality, this is somebody else’s personality. They were just an abundance of fun, their personalities are so much fun to be around and they are always energy giving. Now it will be fun to have them on the court. We had a lot of fun with them last year and it is going to be exciting with them here this year.”
Collier played on the U-19 national team with Stevens two years ago.
“Z is so much fun to be around,” Collier said. “She is the most loved person on the team by the coaches and the players. She has such a fun attitude and positive outlook on life, just a joy to be around her. Player wise, she is really talented, she can really do anything, she is super tall, she can post up, she can shoot the 3 even if somebody is right in her face so she is a really diverse player and I am really happy she is here.”
Auriemma has seen players light it up in practices when they are redshirting and not be able to match that same level of play once they are playing for keeps. He’s hoping that Stevens and Camara make an immediate impact.
“When you haven’t played any games, nobody’s been benched yet, nobody’s been taken out of a game for not playing hard, nobody has had to go through practices where it really means something so we’ll see how everybody reacts,” Auriemma said. “In terms of the kind of people that they are, you always are rolling the dice when you are getting involved with transfers which is why we rarely, rarely do that but in her case, ‘Touly’s case, it was kind of an exception because of the kind of people they are.”
Stevens is already taking on a bit of a leadership role since she will be going into her fourth year of college basketball counting the year of practice she was able to go through a season ago.
“I am trying to help especially the freshmen, I have that year so to be able to tell them and be an example to them,” Stevens said.
“I think just getting to be here it the most exciting thing, it is just a great group to be a part of, we all sort of come from different places and we all come with the same mindset of working together for the (common goal) so that is exciting.”
It hasn’t hurt that Stevens and Camara had each other to lean on a season ago. Transfers need to pay their own way to road games during the season they aren’t eligible to play in games. Stevens and Camara did that quite often a season ago.
“It was really awesome to have her alongside of me going through the whole process,” Stevens said. “It would have been really tough to go through that by myself. It was really nice to travel to games together, we got to talk about experiences coming from different places so it was nice to have somebody going through the same thing so that was really nice.”