The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Riding the Husky hype-train
Bueckers is this year’s sensation; Fudd may be next In Lobo’s day, experience was quite different
How big is Paige Bueckers’ star?
One of women’s basketball’s most iconic figures is lobbying her to help him pick up followers on Instagram. On Thursday, UConn coach Geno Auriemma shared a post of the two posing together in his office. Bueckers, the prized point guard and newly minted Big East Preseason Freshman of the Year, can be seen standing over Auriemma’s left shoulder, throwing up a peace symbol with both hands as Auriemma relaxes in a desk chair. The image is accompanied by a caption: “I only agreed to this so I can get more followers @paigebueckers”
Bueckers certainly isn’t the first celebrated freshman to come to UConn. Rebecca Lobo, Diana Taurasi, Maya Moore and Breanna Stewart all had decorated high school careers and became legends under Auriemma’s watch in Storrs. But none of them ever faced the kind of glare that exists in today’s social media-crazed society.
“Even when Stewie came out a few years ago, it wasn’t like it is today,” Auriemma said. “It seems to be so much.”
Bueckers, who turned 19 earlier this month, is already a celebrity within the basketball world. She has 582,000 followers on Instagram and another 31,000 on Twitter. She’s appeared on magazine covers and been swarmed for autographs.
An article by FiveThirtyEight in May estimated that Bueckers could be the highest-paid college athlete if the NCAA allowed student-athletes to profit off name, image and likeness. Her potential earnings of $670,783 would top even Clemson quarterback Trevor Lawrence, the projected No. 1 pick in the NFL draft, who now has 587,000 followers of his own on Instagram.
There are expectations for Bueckers to come in and be great.
They are out there and easy to find. A few finger taps on Google bring up video clips of a freshman playing for Hopkins High in the western suburbs of Minneapolis.
“I remember I got on the plane in Minnesota to fly home after doing a Lynx game for ESPN,” Rebecca Lobo said. “I don’t remember how it came up, but I was sitting there watching highlight of Paige Bueckers.”
She was 15. Her blonde hair was in a tight bun then and she was rail-thin, but the sweet jump shot, the deft ballhandling, the on-court confidence, they were there for all to see. A few more finger taps and there’s Bueckers playing varsity as an eighth-grader, giving glimpses of what’s to come.
“People all over knew what she looks like,” Lobo said. “They knew who she was. They knew how she plays. She’s a freshman. That couldn’t have existed for some of the other players who came to UConn, because social media wasn’t available. There is a whole nother level of awareness and I suppose the pressure that will come with that, depending on if she sees it as pressure.”
Lobo, who led the UConn women to their first national championship in 1995 in Minneapolis and landed in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame only 13 miles from where she grew up in Southwick, Massachusetts, knew exactly where she was after her freshman year in 1988.
Her first AAU tournament. “That’s when I started getting some handwritten letters from coaches,” Lobo said. “Bill Gibbons at Holy Cross was one of the first to send me a recruiting letter. Probably most of the people in
Southwick didn’t know I was a kid going to play basketball in college.
“It’s a completely different world now than it was in my day or even in Nykesha Sales’ day. There are NBA players watching Paige’s highlights. We know (the Timberwolves’ D’Angelo Russell and KarlAnthony Towns) even went to watch her play in high school. For me it was a handful of college scouts coming. Talk about night and day.”
Lobo in 1991. Sales in 1994. Sue Bird and Swin Cash in 1998. Diana Taurasi, 2000. Tina Charles, 2006. Maya Moore, 2007. Breanna Stewart, 2012. All the way to Christyn Williams in 2018 and Bueckers this year. The list doesn’t begin to capture the more than two dozen UConn players taken in the first round of the WNBA draft, nor the list of 10 Gatorade national high school players of the year. It is merely a timeline to examine The Next Great Player at UConn.
“The world has changed so much,” coach Geno Auriemma said. “Our first celebrity we got to come to Connecticut was Rebecca. To be quite honest, there wasn’t a lot of hoopla, relatively speaking. After that, it was Nykesha Sales, locally maybe there was. You keep naming these people … none of them have ever faced the kind of glare that exists in the world of social media in this day and age. Even Stewie.”
Two matters changed everything. First, the 1995 national championship season. Second, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, et al.
“Back in my day Carl Adamec (from the Manchester Journal Inquirer) was probably the only one that would write about players he knew UConn was recruiting,” Lobo said. “It was different for Sue and Diana, obviously; UConn had won championships and this rabid fan base had developed.
“It wasn’t until my senior year at UConn that I felt my classmates on campus were really aware that I was a basketball player. Everybody always knew who the men’s basketball players were. They knew the quarterback and star running back.”
In many ways, older fans laid the building blocks of interest. CPTV, seeing that interest, got three games on — three! — in 1993-94 and grew from there. Lobo’s senior year changed everything. Interest from the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, ESPN — UConn certainly didn’t invent women’s basketball, but it was most responsible
for the burgeoning traditional media coverage.
Lobo knew it when letters started arriving to her on campus.
“Or if we went to Buckland Hills Mall as a team and people would recognize you,” Lobo said. “People literally wrote letters. It’s not like now when someone likes you or doesn’t like you and will put it in your mentions and hope you see it.”
Yes, that’s a little different than Bueckers’ nearly 600,000 Instagram followers.
“The one thing they all had in common is they were unbelievably talented and really confident,” Auriemma said. “But it’s like Tom Petty’s song ‘Saving Grace.’ They’re confident, but they’re not really sure … When things start to happen, they get a little like, ‘Oh boy, I hope I’m good enough to handle all of this. I thought I was. I think I am, but I hope I’m good enough.’ ”
Auriemma said his approach always has been to let the freshman hype ride itself out.
“Don’t bring it up, don’t mention it, other than to make light of it,” Auriemma said. “I think the more I can make fun of it, the less I can make it serious.”
So it’s not, “Hey, you have a lot of people counting on you. Hey, you’ve got a lot of eyes on you. Hey, you’ve got a lot of followers and they’re all commenting.”
“None of that nonsense.” Auriemma said.
Instead, he’ll say things like “Paige Kardashian.” Or he’ll look at Williams at practice, making sure Bueckers is within earshot, and say, “Christyn, does she think she’s the first good player who ever came to Connecticut? I don’t know what the big deal is.”
“It’s a way to have fun with the kids,” Auriemma said. “Make them realize it’s really not that important. It may be to all those people, but it’s not that important.”
It’s that teasing that make some folks wonder if Auriemma is too tough. If they stick around, those folks will hear those same players as upperclassmen
tease him back in front of the sports world at NCAA Tournament news conferences. It also doesn’t mean practices are cookies and milk.
“I haven’t seen Coach change that much,” Lobo said. “I know other players think differently. I was at practice Stewie’s freshman year and he was brutal on her. This one drill in particular. It just brought me back, ‘Oh my gosh, the gym feels like when I was a freshman.’ And that was Stewie, one of the best ever to go through there. Even the banter I hear and read between him and Paige now. I would like to see a practice. I imagine that in practice he’s going pretty hard on her.”
Auriemma said this is because he knows what is coming next. He talks about how Stewart, as a freshman, was terrific in November and legendary in March in leading the Huskies to the first of her four national titles. They forget her troubles in December through February.
“They’re going to really, really struggle at some point during their freshman year and they’re going to really, really need our help,” Auriemma said. “But if you struggle in today’s world, you’re a failure. There’s no ‘I’m struggling. I’m mediocre.’ No, you’re only great or you’re a failure.
“That’s the screwed-up world a lot of these kids are growing up in. It’s not their fault. Social media has created an environment of ‘You’re fantastic, the best ever.’ Or after two bad games, ‘You’re lousy.’ Neither are true. I know it’s coming. My job is to help them stay level when it does happen.”
Some catch on a to the process a little quicker than others, Lobo said. For her, it was a two-year acclimation.
“It’s sort of a constant battle of trying to live up to expectations, because expectations become higher than they ever were in high school,” Lobo said. “Just the everyday grind can be hard and demanding excellence every second of the day. It’s most evident when
you’re at practice, but it’s also what they expect of you when you’re off the court.”
That means always running hard and cutting hard at practice. It also means looking people in the eye when you talk to them or standing up in front of your locker when being interviewed.
“You do it all until it becomes second nature,” Lobo said. “It’s a learning process. But unlike other learning processes, every single time you make a mistake you have somebody reminding you of it in your ear.”
The payoff? Eleven national titles and all the WNBA titles won by Huskies. Yet what struck Lobo this year is how many UConn players have become spokesmen for social change or sharing important parts of their lives. It’s a long, impressive list.
“Whatever fires you go through at UConn to become the player you are going to be, you also go through those fires to become the kind of person you’re meant to be,” Lobo said. “They become women strong in their conviction to help people. It’s important.”
Lobo has met Bueckers a couple of times when broadcasting games. Bueckers made sure to come over to see Kara Lawson, who coached her on the USA 3x3 team.
“In very limited interaction, Paige strikes me as confident, like a Sue or Diana. She clearly has a sense of humor and is friendly. I really enjoyed being around her. I see how she’ll be a fun personality and kind of a foil for Coach and (Chris Dailey) the next four years.
“They grow up in a different way now and maybe they’re better equipped to handle all the attention. I was older when it came for me and you develop a level of confidence through college, athlete or not. If you’re asking if I’m glad that I wasn’t dealing with all that stuff when I was 18? Oh, yeah.”