The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Finding the key
Soph Coombs believes she has unlocked door to her struggles
STORRS — Her first two seasons under Geno Auriemma’s watch have seemed like a long odyssey, marked by stops and starts, eye rolls and blank stares, and checkered health.
Safe to say, things haven’t gone quite as planned for Mikayla Coombs.
Coombs, a highly sought-after recruit coming out of Georgia in 2017, has spent her time at UConn mostly out of the picture. Her role has been minimal at best, limited to mainly garbage time for the 11-time national champions.
Amid all this gloom, though, is good news: Coombs believes she’s finally unlocked the secret to what’s been holding her back. Herself.
“I have a problem of trying to be a perfectionist,” Coombs, a sophomore guard, said Friday following practice at the Werth Center. “So, with basketball, it’s definitely a hard thing to accomplish. You’re going to make mistakes on the floor. So, (I’m) just focusing on getting away from that perfectionist mindset I’ve instilled in myself.”
Coombs, who contributed 21 quality minutes off the bench Wednesday against Memphis, notching four steals and four rebounds, may be breaking through that mental hurdle with time to spare this season. She believes so. And, just as importantly, Auriemma believes so.
“My confidence level,” Auriemma explained Wednesday, “is generally directly related to the confidence level that they have themselves. So, a kid who’s not confident in themselves, I have no confidence in. And a kid who’s pretty confident because they know it, they’ve worked hard and they believe in themselves, then obviously I feel like that kid’s ready to go.”
Coombs has narrowed her focus on the one area where she’s contributed most — defense. While Coombs has struggled mightily with her shot, going just 5-of-29 from the floor this season and 15-of-60 (25 percent) for her career, her defense has been respectable.
Conversations with Auriemma, who during his 34-year Hall of Fame career has mastered the art of motivation, seem to have boosted Coombs’ confidence.
“He’s just like, ‘You’ve got to calm down. The person who’s holding you back is you,’ ” Coombs said. “I’m just trying to focus on that. I can only go as far as I can take myself. In the past, I’ve been holding myself back. I’ve been worrying about every single thing.”
Coombs was able to overcome that mindset in high school, where she performed well enough to rocket into the top-15 of ESPN’s national recruiting rankings. But at UConn, the gold standard of women’s college basketball, Coombs has struggled.
She played sparingly across 25 games as a freshman, averaging 1.1 points, before missing the latter part of the year with a blood clot in her leg. Although she’s been healthy this season, her stats — 0.9 points on 5of-29 shooting, including 0-of-5 from 3 — have largely remained the same.
Her teammates see improvement, though.
“I think she’s been doing a really good job of kind of understanding what she’s really good at and what she can do to help us, and not putting too much pressure on herself to do too much,” guard Katie Lou Samuelson said. “I think when she goes out there (she’s thinking), ‘I know I’m going to do this, this and this, and if I do those things, then I’m going to help the team.’
“She’s in a really good spot.”