It’s been a while
Strength coach Andrea Hudy back in Storrs 17 years after leaving
UConn women’s basketball director of sports performance Andrea Hudy likes to challenge the athletes she works with. She wants them to become comfortable in the uncomfortable and learn to push themselves even when battling injuries.
This season, she’s in a Peleton battle with Aubrey Griffin in an effort to help the junior recover from an ongoing back injury that has prevented her from playing so far this year. While the two battle on the stationary bike to see who can get the better score, the competition helps Griffin become stronger and get that much closer to getting back on the court.
When asked which of the two is more often leading the competition, Hudy laughed: “You’ll have to ask Aubrey that. … One of our nicknames is ‘Chicken.’ Ask Aubrey who’s chicken.”
That kind of banter has helped Hudy connect with student-athletes during her long career. Teaching athletes how to develop into stronger and better versions of themselves both on and off the court is Hudy’s passion. She combines strength and conditioning technologies to create individualized workouts to help athletes past their college careers.
This season she returned to the program where she started her career wanting to give back to its athletes what she once learned as a graduate assistant first getting her start in the sports performance world.
Hudy was hired by UConn in May after spending two years as Head Coach of Basketball Strength and Conditioning at the University of Texas. She also spent 15 years working with the Kansas men’s basketball program, a job she began after spending nine years at UConn.
Now she’s back in Storrs. And she returns during a challenging year for UConn: Paige Bueckers, Azzi Fudd, Nika Mühl and Griffin have been sidelined with injuries, altering how Hudy plans each athlete’s strength and conditioning training. UConn (6-2) is coming off a win over UCLA Saturday in Newark and next plays Sunday against Louisville at Mohegan Sun Arena.
Hudy said she was drawn back to Geno Auriemma’s program to help her grow as a coach.
“Just being around this environment makes you learn and makes me be a better person and a better coach,” Hudy said. “We’re like a family. And I feel like it’s home in terms of the education that I get and the standards that we have.”
The former University of Maryland volleyball player became passionate about strength and conditioning while dealing with knee and shoulder injuries and learning from former Maryland strength and conditioning coach Jim Costello.
She got her first handson experience working with college athletes in 1995 as a graduate assistant with UConn’s athletic department. The Huskies won eight national titles (five with women basketball, two with men basketball and one with men’s soccer) during Hudy’s first nine years in Storrs. She helped train some of the university’s all-time best athletes, including Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, and Ray Allen.
When she joined the University of Kansas men’s basketball program, she saw how using technology systems like EliteForm, SpartaTrac and Catapult could collect data from individual athletes to make better and safer workouts.
Her evaluations of athletes no longer centered on
the amount of weight an athlete could lift, or even how strong they were compared to others, but instead on how each athlete’s force production — how fast someone lifts a barbell, at what point they hit fatigue — determined individual strength.
She used the data to create specialized workout plans for each athlete to prevent injuries by building on their unique strengths and weaknesses.
“Just because somebody is stronger doesn’t make them better at their sport,” Hudy said. “It’s important that people train hard and smart, not just hard, and know what the goals are.
“I look at how can we enhance force production or how can we change force production to get it to where we need it to be for basketball players.”
The Jayhawks became the first college athletic program to use these technologies as it won the 2008 national championship and had 35 athletes selected in the NBA Draft during Hudy’s 15 years with the program. Hudy was named the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s 2013 Coach of the Year and presented with the organization’s Impact Award in 2017.
Hudy brought these technologies back to Storrs, where she returned this spring to work solely with the women’s basketball program.
“With these ladies, they’re the elite, so their force production is already great,” she said. “We’re just trying to educate them on how to be better, how to be healthier and how to be a better teammate.”
To Hudy, the most rewarding part is watching an athlete develop a passion for wanting to learn why and how certain workouts help prepare their body.
“I want engagement. I want questions. I want them to ask why, what, how because it keeps me in check,” Hudy said. “One of the reasons that I came back to the University of Connecticut was that I knew I was going to become a better coach because they are such highlevel people and such highlevel athletes where I knew I was going to get those questions and challenges.”
She began working with this year’s team during its summer conditioning session. She introduced players to Olympic lifting and pushed them through a 10x22 workout where players ran baseline to baseline (twice the length of the court) in less than 22 seconds 10 times.
“It was hard. It definitely challenged us in a different way,” Fudd said. “We do a lot of Olympic lifting, and I had never done some of that stuff before. But I love it. … She’s always yelling and screaming, which is how she should be. She makes the weight room a great environment.”
For one of their final preseason workouts, Hudy challenged the team with a 20v22. While doing reps of 22s is a common basketball workout, doing 20 is equivalent to more than a mile and tests an athlete’s reaction strength and stamina.
On the day of the workout, she set her watch to 28 minutes and gave each player about 38 seconds of rest between each rep. Hudy said most players finished around the 24-minute mark with Bueckers finishing first at 21 minutes.
“She’s different. She’s built to play basketball,” Hudy said of Bueckers, last year’s national player of the year. “You can throw anything at Paige, and she would excel at it.”
Bueckers is out for the next six to eight weeks due to a tibial plateau fracture she suffered during UConn’s game against Notre Dame when she hyper-extended her leg during a jab-step. She will presumably be working closely with Hudy for rehab and physical therapy, as will the others on UConn’s injured reserve, low weight-bearing group — Mühl (foot) and Fudd (foot).
Hudy, informed by her own experience as a student-athlete, constantly tells players and especially underclassmen to take days off and limit extra reps to avoid injury risk.
“There are times where they want to do extra and it’s diminishing return. Like that extra might make you feel like you’re getting better, but it can actually take away from your performance,” Hudy said. “We’re trying to manage Azzi Fudd. She wants to do so well and she’s so competitive. She wants to be No. 1 and it’s good, it’s really good, but then you’re like, ‘OK, maybe you could need a day off because more may not be better.’ ”
Hudy’s work with UConn goes beyond practices and games. It shows each athlete how to best maintain their health and strength to achieve goals of reaching the next level.
“We’re teaching them lifetime skills and that this is gonna be a part of your career if you want to continue to play basketball because health is very important,” Hudy said. “Health has to be an underlying mechanism in your performance.”
Coming back to UConn is full circle for Hudy. She’s back at the place that launched her passion for helping student-athletes and returns ready to teach this year’s team how to become better versions of themselves like the program once did with her.
“I feel like I’m a teacher at heart,” Hudy said. “Teachers disseminate information, so to be able to see somebody take that information and get better and win and share it with their teammates and be a part of something bigger than themselves I think is pretty special. I’ve been doing it for 27, going on 28 years and there’s nothing better than feeling a part of a community and it’s a pretty elite community.”