The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Huskies host Creighton in first game back in three weeks
UConn plays its first game in three weeks on Sunday with about seven available players.
A surge of COVID-19 cases after the holidays forced the No. 11-ranked Huskies to shut down. Add an ongoing battle with injuries and the team hasn’t been able to practice with more than seven players since before its last game on Dec. 19.
Sunday’s home game against Creighton (1 p.m.) will not only be UConn’s 2022 debut but will also be a test of the team’s depleted bench and limited practiced lineup.
“With these last couple days we’ve had of trying to get better and as we start playing some games and the games start coming in a rhythmic fashion we’ll be able to kinda develop an identity for this new team that we have now until we get everybody back,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma told media Friday.
Four players tested positive for COVID among those returning to Storrs on Dec. 26. The team shut down and canceled games as the positive players went into a 10day quarantine period per Big East policy.
Players who could still practice did so and continued conditioning and workouts with small groups.
“When a couple of us weren’t here, just having barely five people in the gym was tough, and it’s tough to practice like that but the coaches don’t really switch up how they coach at all,” senior Evina Westbrook said. “We’re gonna run the same drills, the practice plan is going to stay the same whether we have two people out there, four people out there or we have all of us out there.
“At the end of the day we gotta push through, because the game is like that. The game is filled with ups and downs. You don’t know what’s going to happen, who we’re gonna need to step up. So it has been a test just with everything going on, but I think we’ve all handled it pretty well.”
UConn (6-3) spent time focus
ing on individual and basic drills instead of full-team scrimmages with such a limited group. It didn’t help that practices were minimized without the team’s normal group of practice players, since the student body is off campus until the spring semester starts Jan. 18.
“Obviously you’re not going up and down the floor as much as you’d like, you’re not playing five-onfive on the court as much as you’d like,” Auriemma said. “So your conditioning suffers and you’re working on some basic things. You’re getting a lot more shots up. ... In that respect, you can try to make some sense of ‘Are we making any progress?’ But in terms of ‘Are we making any progress as a team?’ that’s really hard to figure out. We won’t know that until Sunday. Individuals, I’m sure, have gotten a chance to work on some things. As a team, no, hardly at all.”
Westbrook said a positive of the limited team size at practice is that is has forced players to build on their communication on the floor, knowing each person had to cover more ground during practice scrimmages.
“I think it’s almost harder when we’re playing three-on-three, four-onfour, having to move and having to be in the same defensive spots or offensive spots as if we’re playing five-on-five,” she said. “So I think when we get five people out there it’s actually going to be easier than it is when we play three-onthree, four-on-four. It’s been tough. It’s been forcing us to talk, which that’s been a big problem for us, just our communication on offense and on defense, and that’s one thing that we ourselves talk about often in the locker room. … I think over this break we’ve just been emphasizing, ‘Let’s just listen and lock in.’ ”
The Huskies remain without Paige Bueckers (tibial plateau fracture and torn meniscus), Azzi Fudd (foot) and Aubrey Griffin due to injury. But sophomore Nika Mühl made her return to practice this week after sitting out the last three games with a foot injury, allowing the team to practice with seven players for the first time since before the holidays.
However, UConn will remain short-benched Sunday, as Mühl is limited to just 15 minutes, and Auriemma said freshman Amari DeBerry will not be ready to play, with sophomore Piath Gabriel also unavailable.
It will be the first game all year the Huskies will have only two subs on the bench — that is, until Mühl’s 15 minutes are up and they go down to just one extra player.
“You go into the game and you try to use all your timeouts as best you can. You try to rotate people as best you can,” Auriemma said. “There is no magical formula that you can use to say ‘This is how you deal with this,’ it’s just one of those things. You play it by ear. You go into games, keep your eyes open and see what’s going on out there and see who looks like what and try to figure out how to keep everybody fresh.”
UConn hasn’t dropped a regular-season conference game since 2013 and is 3-0 all-time against Creighton. Meanwhile, the Blue Jays (10-3) are having their best conference start (5-0) since the 2004-05 season.
While the Huskies will be stretched thin Sunday, Westbrook said the team is ready to get back to playing games and remaining focused on what they can control on the court.
“We’re just ready to play somebody else besides ourselves and our practice guys. I think in the long run it has been beneficial, getting the chance to work on things that we haven’t been able to work on so much because we’ve been playing, but now I think we’re just ready to get into a game flow,” Westbrook said.
“I think all of us are kinda at a point, at least I am, where it is what it is. There’s not much that we can do, and a lot of the things that happened are out of our control. So for me especially, I’m not going to get frustrated with things that I can’t control. Just trying to reiterate that to everyone else.”