The UConn women know life in the bubble will be a grind, they’ll be ready
UConn navigating three weeks in the NCAA’s Texas bubble site
After enduring a five-day stay at Mohegan Sun for the Big East Tournament, the UConn women’s basketball team now faces an even greater test of mental fortitude in its chase for a 12th national championship.
The Huskies arrived in Texas Tuesday and will be there for close to three weeks, if all goes as planned.
While spending all that time holed up in a hotel obviously isn’t ideal, the Huskies understand what’s at stake. Associate head coach Chris Dailey, running the team in Geno Auriemma’s absence, said the program can draw upon some adverse experiences.
“We can’t worry about it,” Dailey told Hearst Connecticut Media in a phone interview last week. “The last seven years we were in the AAC, our players never complained. We’d get home at 3 in the morning and they’d still go to school. There’s nothing you can do to change it.
“Whatever our situation is, our approach will be, ‘Let’s deal with it, let’s figure it out.’ The teams that handle it the best will be the teams that have the best chance of moving on.”
This year’s tournament is being staged entirely in the San Antonio area, with some first-round games in nearby San Marcos and Austin. No. 1 seeded UConn (24-1) plays No. 16 High Point Sunday at 8 p.m. (ESPN) at the Alamodome.
Dailey, Auriemma’s sidekick of 36 years, is the interim head coach through the first two rounds of the tournament after Auriemma tested positive for COVID-19 on Sunday. Assistant
Shea Ralph is also currently away from the team after a member of her family was diagnosed with the coronavirus.
Thus, Dailey and assistant Jamelle Elliott are the Huskies’ only remaining coaches in the bubble. Dailey is 10-0 as a head coach when Auriemma has been unavailable, while Elliott spent nine seasons as Cincinnati head coach.
Teams are spread across seven hotels in Texas. But as teams settled into the controlled environment this week, players and officials began commenting on the amenities. Social media
posts showed a disparity between the weight-training facilities available to the women in San Antonio and the men in Indianapolis. Other posts compared the difference in gift bags given to the women and the men, along with comments on the food choices.
Paige Bueckers’ mother Amy Fuller quote tweeted over a photo of a meal served to the women: “THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. Do better NCAA!”
NCAA vice president of women’s basketball Lynn Holzman addressed the training issue in a statement Thursday afternoon: “We acknowledge that some of the amenities teams would typically have access to have not been as available inside the controlled environment. In part, this is due to the limited space, and the original plan was to expand the workout area once additional space was available later in the tournament. However, we want to be responsive to the needs of our participating teams, and we are actively working to enhance existing resources at practice courts, including additional weight training equipment.”
Oregon’s Sedona Prince later posted a video showing unused space in the weight-training area and said, “If you are not upset about this problem, then you are part of it.”
Beyond the amenities and logistics, teams are also adhering to health guidelines. Each team had to test negative for COVID-19 seven straight days prior to arrival and then produce two more negative tests at least 12 hours apart. They’re required to quarantine during that time.
Meals are to be eaten either alone or in a physically distanced room with assigned seating. Masks are strictly enforced outside of practice and games except when isolated in hotel rooms or during prearranged meal times.
And the testing? That continues every day. What’s a team to do? “Well, I think we’re going to be doing a lot of homework cooped up in our rooms,” UConn freshman guard Paige Bueckers said. “We’ll have to get caught up on that, probably get ahead just because of how busy we’ll be when the tournament starts. We’re going to be isolated at lot.”
There will be Netflix, too. Maybe a few card games. Oh, and TikTok. Definitely TikTok.
“We had a lot of time in
Mohegan, so those we were able to get done,” said Bueckers, the self-proclaimed best dancer on the team. “I’m sure we’ll have a lot of time (in Texas) as well.”
For Dailey, the Mohegan bubble was an adjustment.
“We traveled everywhere together as a group,” Dailey said. “Whereas before, if I wanted to leave breakfast early to go get my work done, I could do that. I’m just using that as an example. You’re traveling in a pack of 25, and you don’t have a choice. You wait around a lot, but it didn’t really obviously impact us. We adjusted different things like study hall, and it really worked out well.”
The top-ranked Huskies rolled past St. John’s, Villanova and Marquette en route to their 19th Big East Tournament title — and first since 2012. They’ve won 14 straight games, and are a favorite to reach a 13th straight Final Four.
Getting there promises to be a grind — both mentally and physically — but the Huskies are just going to roll with whatever they encounter.
“That’s kind of our approach,” Dailey said. “We’re just going to figure it out. In my mind, privately, I may question it and go, ‘What the heck,’ but when it comes to what we’re doing as a team, we’ll be on the same page, we’ll figure it out. We’ll get the best schedule and we’ll put it together and we’ll work with it and make it happen.
“There’s not much we can do. You hope (the tournament protocols) are guided by safety and common sense, and the rest of it we’ll figure it out.”