Put me in coach
Bueckers plays the most minutes for UConn and freshman wouldn’t have it any other way
Paige Bueckers was pulled out of the Big East championship game March 8 with 3:23 remaining and UConn leading Marquette by 32. A celebration was underway and so, too, was Bueckers’ latest sideline confrontation with coach Geno Auriemma.
“She was (complaining) about playing time again,” Auriemma said during the postgame press conference. “One of our players was at the free throw line (earlier) and she yelled, ‘Miss,’ because she knew she was coming out (on a dead ball). I love her and everything, but there’s something not quite right about her.”
Brian Cosgriff finds this hilarious.
He knows pulling Bueckers from a game can lead to drama.
“Massive arguments,” said Cosgriff, who coached Bueckers at Hopkins High in Minnetonka, Minn. “Paige always has to have the last word. We’d be up by 40 and my whole thing was, I didn’t want to get her hurt. I didn’t want her injured, and I had 18 kids on the team. I’m like, ‘OK, you’ve got your 25, we’re up by 40, let some other kids play.’
“Oh, she’d give me an earful. Most of the time, I’d just take it — because it’s Paige and that’s just her. But depending on my mood, I might snap back. The things Geno is dealing with … are the exact same things I would deal with. It’s comical.”
There might not be a better freshman player in America than Bueckers. There might not be a better player in America, period. Yet as UConn prepares to open the NCAA Tournament and pursuit of a 12th national championship, it has become clear that Bueckers sandwiches her basketball wizardry with a relentless personality and equally relentless approach to the sport.
She doesn’t like sitting. She doesn’t like resting. She ribs coaches before games and battles them on the way out because she figures there is rarely a time that makes sense for her to sit and watch.
“Whenever I get pulled and I’m not in the game, I feel some type of way,” Bueckers said. “I always love to play, no matter if we’re down 50 or up 50 . ... I’ve had a great relationship with all the coaches who have coached me throughout my life, and just being able to have that open communication to let them know I’m not happy with them, and tell them I want to go back in the game, that’s always been me.”
Bueckers is hard to guard, NCAA players are finding out.
She’s even harder to protect, those in her life understand.
“Probably the toughest stretches were the AAU gauntlet when you get to July,” said Paige’s father, Bob Bueckers. “One July
she played 22 days or something. And those are mostly two games a day, and could be three. I think she had her first ice bath in fifth or sixth grade. … One time she got back from a USA Basketball trip and went straight from the airport to an AAU practice.”
Bueckers’ body has taken a pounding over the years. She has traveled the world playing, and winning gold medals, at various levels of USA Basketball, including the 2019 FIBA U19 World Cup in Thailand, the 2018 FIBA U17 World Cup in Belarus and the 2017 FIBA Americas U16 Championship in Argentina.
She played five years of varsity at Hopkins, and summer after summer with the Minnesota Metro Stars AAU club.
Minnesota, Cosgriff said, has a rule that a player can participate in no more than three halves of games in a day.
“So as a seventh grader we’d play her two halves on the sophomore team and they’d just kick butt,” he said. “Then our JV team would be tied or behind at half and she’d come over and win the JV game for us.”
By the time Bueckers’ left Hopkins the varsity team had won 62 games in a row, winning a state championship her junior year. There was always Plan A and, if that failed, Plan P — just get the ball to Paige, who was a “peanut” in middle school and was known as “Olive Oil” in her early varsity days, all appendages. Last season, the Royals advanced to the championship game, which was canceled due to the pandemic.
Weeks earlier, Bueckers was limited in practices and sometimes wore a protective boot on her right leg. She was suffering from a stress reaction, which essentially means pain from overuse. Cosgriff held Bueckers out of the team’s opening state tournament game in late-February 2020. Bueckers didn’t complain that time. Even she realized that rest was necessary.
“Paige has got an incredibly high basketball IQ and she’s got a coach’s mentality, but she’s also a competitor and she doesn’t want to come out of a game, especially if she’s cooking with gas,” Cosgriff said. “The things I had to always get after Paige for was shooting the basketball (more), and to put on some freaking warm clothes and eat properly. She’d go out, dead of winter, with shorts and a jacket on … then eat candy for dinner.”
On January 21, Bueckers rolled an ankle and hobbled to the locker room with 3:12 left and UConn leading Tennessee by eight. She returned, still hobbling, with 1:16 left and made the clinching 3-pointer with 25 seconds remaining. She sat out UConn’s next game, a victory over Georgetown.
UConn’s only loss this season was Jan. 28 at Arkansas. Prior to that, Bueckers hadn’t lost a game since 2018, her sophomore season at Hopkins. Cosgriff stepped down as coach after last season. Tara Starks, Bueckers’ longtime coach with the Metro Stars, took over. Hopkins is undefeated again, with the winning streak now at 74.
Bueckers, meanwhile, is averaging 19.7 points and 6.1 assists for the Huskies (24-1).
“People ask me, ‘Is she cocky?’ ” Cosgriff said. “Yeah, she’s cocky. But you need to be cocky. You don’t go out to Connecticut and do what she’s doing and not have confidence.”
On Feb. 8, Bueckers scored 31 points, including the Huskies’ final 13 and a 3-pointer that kicked high off the rim before falling through the net with 10 seconds left in overtime, in a victory over then-No. 1 South Carolina.
“The Tennessee one was cool,” Bob Bueckers said. “I could tell she was hurt pretty bad when she rolled her ankle. And to see her run back out — that was probably one of her worst games of the year to that point and, bang, she hits the 3. The South Carolina game was the first I went to. Not a bad game to take in for your first one seeing her wear the jersey.
“It’s been fun. She’s been given a unique opportunity to play as much as she has. But as a parent, the most rewarding thing is how close the team is, both on and off the court, and just knowing that she’s absolutely at the place she dreamt of and is living her best life — to see those girls play and goof with each other, the tightness of the group.”
Auriemma has implored Bueckers to shoot more often.
“Yeah, I’ve dealt with that,” Cosgriff said. “The problem was she liked passing the ball more than shooting the 3, and there was nobody on my team that could shoot like she could — but there was also nobody who could pass like she could. And she enjoyed that more. She loved making her teammates better.”
Bueckers averages a team-high 35.8 minutes. In a Big East semifinal against Villanova, she played 33.
“Then she came off and checked the stat sheet and said, ‘You owe me two minutes because I didn’t get to play my average,’ ” Auriemma said.
Bueckers got her wish. She played 37 in the championship game. Then, after a little back-and-forth with her coach, she cheered from the bench.
“She’s a great teammate because she’s a great human being,” Auriemma said. “She’s one of those kids that just gets the big picture and understands what the purpose is of being on a team and how her special skills can infuse confidence in a team. She’s very sensitive to a lot of things kids her age would not concern herself with. Everything affects her because she wants it to.”