Healthy hopes
Fudd’s goal is to be in top shape 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