Making the grade
UConn players honored for academic achievement: ‘Great pride’
STORRS — The halftime buzzer went off at Gampel Pavilion Wednesday night with the UConn women’s basketball team holding an 11-point lead over Big East rival Villanova.
But instead of heading to the locker room, most of the Huskies — 11 of the 14 players on the roster to be exact — walked over to the bench. They were then the first to be introduced as part of the Athletic Director’s Honor Roll for student-athletes that had a 3.0 grade point average or better in either the spring or fall 2023 semester.
“I think it’s just the culture we have here at UConn,” UConn guard Paige Bueckers said after No. 10 UConn’s 67-46 win before an announced sellout crowd of 10,299. “We demand excellence in everything that we do. They prepare us in that way to be professionals in the classroom, on the court, and off the court. It’s kind of just what is expected of us, and we all take pride in school. So it’s easy for us to demand that of ourselves.”
The Huskies were represented from AllAmerican candidate seniors to their true freshmen.
Named to the team were Bueckers, fellow academic seniors Nika Mühl and Aaliyah Edwards, juniors Azzi Fudd, Caroline Ducharme, and Amari DeBerry, sophomore Inês Bettencourt, redshirt freshman Jana El Alfy, and true freshmen KK Arnold, Ashlynn Shade, and Qadence Samuels.
“It’s quite an accomplishment if you go to college and play college basketball or any major college sport with all the demands on you and can have the same level of success as other kids or even more so in the classroom,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. “That means a lot to me, to our program. It’s a promise you make to their parents and you want to deliver on it.”
Since Auriemma and associate head coach Chris Dailey came to UConn in 1985, every four
year player who completed her eligibility with the Huskies has earned a degree. Two former UConn players — Rebecca Lobo and Maya Moore — are among three (Marquette’s Allazia Blockton is the other) to be named Big East women’s basketball scholar-athlete twice.
Last August, eight members of the 2022-2023 Huskies — Mühl, Bueckers, Edwards, Fudd, Bettencourt, Aubrey Griffin, Dorka Juhász, and Lou Lopez Sénéchal — were named to the 2023 all-Big East academic team. Griffin received her degree in women’s studies on time in May and announced on Senior Night that she will be returning to UConn as a second-year graduate student in 2024-25. She was lost for the 2023-24 on Jan. 3 with a torn anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee.
“We have always taken great pride in what we do on and off the court since Day 1 when I got here,” Auriemma said. “CD and I sat down and said this is how we’re going to do things. We haven’t wavered or changed one bit since 1985. There may be some kids we don’t recruit. There may be some kids we should have recruited. But if you’re coming to play basketball at the University of Connecticut and you’re not committed to what is happening the rest of your day, and if academics aren’t important to you personally, to your family, and everybody and you don’t take it personally and you don’t make that your No. 1 priority then you’re not going to last here generally speaking.
“First, we try not to take somebody like that. Second, when you do get here we are going to do everything we can to help you. Then you have to do the rest. The fact that they put so much time and effort into it given the travel schedule and everything else, it says a lot about them as individuals that their priorities are in order.”
Academics played an important role in bringing Arnold, Auriemma’s first recruit from Wisconsin, to UConn.
“It was a big thing,” Arnold said. “And having a meeting with our academic adviser Ellen (Tripp) was a big emphasis on how much time we spend off the court and how much time we get for study hall either after practices or when we come back from road games. It really helps us in terms of studying. They helped our whole freshman group in terms of us adjusting to college level academics.”
The 11 players from the roster weren’t the only members of the women’s basketball family honored Wednesday night.
Grace Maria, a freshman on the women’s volleyball team and daughter of former UConn guard and 1995 national champion Sarah Northway, was among 21 student-athletes honored for achieving a perfect 4.0 GPA. In her freshman season in the fall, Maria appeared in 26 matches and saw action in 96 sets. Her 27 aces were third on the team and her 180 digs were fourth. She had a season-high 14 digs against Xavier on Nov. 12.
Northway went on to earn her law degree from the Georgetown University Law Center in 2001.
“It’s in the DNA,” Auriemma said. “Anybody that played here passes it on to their kids. You’d like to think that.”
Auriemma then smiled, but the academic side is something the coaches and players take seriously and is meaningful to them.
“It says that we’re student-athletes and that we excel both on the court and off the court,” Edwards said.