Ducharme planning to ‘make the most of it’ after injuries
When she was sidelined with a torn ACL heading into her freshman high school season, Caroline Ducharme found ways to completely remake her shooting stroke, refining a skill set that makes her one of the top basketball prospects in America.
When she was out with a torn labrum as a sophomore, Ducharme embraced ways to diversify her life in and out of sport, becoming a de facto assistant coach who prepared detailed scouting reports for her Noble and
Greenough School teammates, all the while rehabbing and taking up a photography hobby that remains a passion.
A five-year line graph representing the degree of difficulty of Ducharme’s student-athlete life would bounce up and down with the volatility of cryptocurrency — much like the numbers next to her name in national recruiting rankings built on an inexact science. All along, though, when the basketball world was watching and when it wasn’t, Ducharme has remained on a steady trajectory in becoming an intriguing addition to Geno Auriemma’s UConn program.
“You figure out ways to make the most of it,” Ducharme said.
She repeated this several times in a conversation about her basketball past, present and future.
Ducharme, of Milton, Massachusetts, arrives on the Storrs campus Sunday, the team officially reports Tuesday, and Ducharme will return to Massachusetts on Friday, June 4, for her high school graduation in Dedham. She is part of a
senior class that endured pandemic disruptions and complications during a critical time for development and planning.
She made the most of that, too, though. On Thursday, she was named Massachusetts Gatorade State Player of the Year for the second consecutive year, having averaged 31 points, 15.3 rebounds, 5.3 assists, 4.5 steals and 3.3 blocks in a truncated COVID-19 season that included a lot of time away from the sport.
Ducharme improved as a player, though, often working out with her younger brother, Reid Ducharme, who coincidentally is being recruited by Dan Hurley’s UConn men’s team. She took up journaling while quarantining. She is used to improvising — reading and playing opportunities and obstacles like she does the most sophisticated defense.
“I did get good things out of this past year, for sure,” Ducharme said. “You make the most of it. It was definitely hard to have that mindset at first (with major injuries) because it’s overwhelming, you’re young and you think it’s going to take so long. But my parents really instilled that from the beginning like, ‘You can be sad, yes it sucks, but don’t live there. Find a way to make the most of this time.’ … It helped me to focus on other ways to improve my game, and other goals, the little things I wouldn’t be able to do.”
Ducharme, a 6-foot-1 guard who reminds Auriemma of Ann Strother, was the 15th best guard and 41st best overall player in the Class of 2021, according to ESPN’s HoopGurlz rankings, when she committed to UConn in April 2020. She had recently been named Massachusetts Gatorade State Player of the Year, averaging 24.8 points, 14.0 rebounds, 5.2 assists and 3.0 blocks as a junior.
In the time since, Ducharme has shot up the rankings. She is now, according to HoopGurlz, the No. 5 prospect in her class (No. 3 among guards) behind only longtime friend Azzi Fudd, the No. 1 overall player in America, also headed to UConn, and three players bound for South Carolina — Raven Johnson, Saniya Rivers and Sania Feagin.
How does this happen, the spikes and valleys of a basketball reputation?
Out of sight, out of mind, basically.
NO TIME WASTED
Ducharme’s parents, dad Todd and mom Chrissy, said Ducharme was consistently a top-five national player in ratings produced by various scouting services in middle school. But the torn ACL sustained after her eighth-grade season cost her a full offseason and part of the following season.
She spent months working on her jump shot, trying to change the angles of her knee and elbow joints while working toward developing a higher and quicker release. She wasn’t known as a great shooter a few years ago. Today, she is.
“Being out, I was able to completely break it down, and usually when you break down your shot it gets worse before it gets better,” Ducharme said. “But it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t playing. I would put a band around my knees and just shoot for hours.”
The torn labrum cost her the entirety of her sophomore season.
“I was just starting to get back in the groove after my ACL,” Ducharme said. “After a recovery like that, once you’re cleared it still takes months to really feel like yourself again. I was just starting to get back into that mode of feeling good and confident. Then my shoulder happened. It was like, not another one. I didn’t want to fall behind. I didn’t want to be forgotten about. All these girls with the opportunity to play, they were going to get a lot of attention. It was a lull in recruiting.”
While other top national players were developing and gaining exposure, Ducharme was shooting without jumping, obsessively watching film, devising game plans for Noble coach Alex Gallagher and taking photos.
“I hate even talking about the rankings, but that’s part of it, and we kept saying to Caroline, ‘Let that fuel you,’ ” Chrissy Ducharme said. “You don’t ever want to have that with Caroline. She gets going, and that was the motivation.”
“I did view it as an opportunity to prove myself,” Ducharme said. “It gave me a reason to take things personally (upon returning), every matchup, every game, every player that I played against.”
Auriemma began recruiting Ducharme about two years ago but didn’t immediately offer a scholarship.
“She was under the radar a little bit,” Auriemma said. “When you first look at her, you’re not quite sure she can play at the highest level. But then when you play against her, watch her on the court, you can see like, wow, that kid’s really good. What I like the most about her is that during the recruiting process, I had to say to her a couple times, ‘We have no idea what our scholarship situation is. If you can hang in there with is, I think it’s going to work out great. But if you need to make a decision and go someplace [else], I truly understand.’ The kid was like, ‘No, Coach, just be honest with me, tell me where I stand and I’ll make my decision based on that.’ I told her I just need to sort some things out — who’s coming back, who’s not. I knew all along that I wanted her to be here and I’m really excited about her coming. She’s kind of an edgy kid, which I really like.”
Auriemma brought up Strother, the similarities being that Ducharme can play multiple positions and score in a variety of ways. Strother averaged 10 points as a freshman in 2002-03 and played particularly well in that year’s NCAA Tournament, helping UConn to its fourth national championship. Strother was part of another championship team as a sophomore and averaged 11.9 points in her career.
Growing up about 90 miles from Gampel Pavilion, Ducharme spent her childhood fascinated by UConn basketball. One of her favorite players was Stefanie Dolson, who was a WNBA rookie with the Washington Mystics in 2014. In D.C. that summer for an AAU tournament, Ducharme saw Dolson in a pizza restaurant and followed her outside for an autograph.
Ducharme chose the Huskies over Oregon, North Carolina and Tennessee.
“I didn’t go (to UConn) just because that’s what I wanted to do when I was 10,” Ducharme said. “I did look at other schools, but I always had UConn in the back of my mind and kept coming back to it. At the end of the day it was about my relationships and conversations with the coaches. Playing under Coach Auriemma, you can’t get that anywhere else. I felt like he was the best coach to push me and prepare me for the next level. I’ve always wanted to play with the best and I feel like that’s what you get at UConn every day.”
NOBLE PRIDE
Todd, who grew up in Taunton, Massachusetts, and Chrissy met as students at Williams College in the 1990s. Todd was on the football and track teams, Chrissy the basketball team. Todd is a technology consultant and Chrissy coaches lacrosse and basketball at Noble, where she also works in admissions. They like to say Caroline is bound for the WNBA, Reid is bound for the NBA and Ashley will wind up as their agent or general manager.
The Noble and Greenough pride runs deep in the Ducharme family, which lives in the Milton house where Chrissy’s grandfather was born some 100 years ago. Chrissy was a 1,000-point scorer at Noble, a private school with rigorous academics.
Caroline’s older sister, Ashley Ducharme, graduated from Noble and is entering her senior year as a basketball player at Brown. Reid is through his sophomore year at Noble, but he is transferring to Brewster Academy in New Hampshire for his junior season. New UConn assistant Luke Murray has been the main contact lately in the recruitment of Reid, a 6-6 guard.
Caroline was a varsity player at Noble in eighth grade and was named MVP as the team won the New England Preparatory School Athletic Council championship. The team won every year that she participated, including her freshman and junior seasons. The event was not held last season due to the pandemic.
Noble did not win the year Ducharme sat out with the torn labrum as a sophomore.
“Sore subject,” said her father, Todd.
“She was like, ‘I want an asterisk next to that,’ ” Chrissy said.
Ducharme was dominant as a junior and, like most every player in America, limited in what she could do as a senior. The Noble season was limited to 12 games. Her AAU team, Exodus, found a fair amount of games but there were long stretches throughout the pandemic of inactivity and isolation.
With virtual learning in place for much of the school year, Ducharme in October spent two weeks at the IMPACT Basketball training facility in Las Vegas, sharing facilities with numerous first-round NBA draft picks and working individually with the Las Vegas Aces’ Kelsey Plum, who was rehabbing a torn Achilles.
Ducharme looked into enrolling at UConn early, like classmate Saylor Poffenbarger, who joined the Huskies in January. Ultimately, it was deemed impossible for her to earn a diploma from Noble on that schedule. She will be one of three freshman newcomers at UConn, with Fudd and Amari DeBerry. Ducharme and Fudd will be roommates.
“We’ve been really close since middle school and we always said we wanted to play together in college,” Ducharme said. “We had hopes that it would work out.”
There’s one more big family dinner planned this week, Ducharme said — mom, dad, brother, sister, a bunch of cousins, etc. — and time playing in the yard with the family’s English mastiff, Lola. There will probably be some pickup basketball, too, on the driveway court where most of her training took place over the years alongside her siblings.
Then it’s off to a new state and a new basketball world, one with accelerated expectations and demands that another close friend, Paige Bueckers, has spent a lot of time explaining to Ducharme in recent months.
“Coach basically said (to Caroline), ‘I’m going to tell you what I’ve told every one of my recruits, including Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi, that if you come here and you play well, you’ll play, and if you suck, you won’t,’ ” Todd Ducharme said. “And she said, ‘I’m in. Where do I sign?’ That literally was the line, like, ‘I’m going to work so hard that you have to play me.’ ”
There’s an opportunity, at least. Ducharme will try to make the most of it.