History lesson
Aubrey Griffin has experience returning from injury
UConn has managed with eight healthy players the past two weeks, as four players have been sidelined with injuries.
Three of the four — Paige Bueckers, Nika Mühl and Azzi Fudd — have expected timelines of return.
But junior Aubrey Griffin remains out indefinitely with no word on when she will be back. Griffin has yet to play this season after suffering a high ankle sprain during a preseason practice before an ongoing back injury resurfaced soon after.
This isn’t the first first time Griffin has dealt with an injury and the 6-foot-1 forward has displayed a determination in her recovery process from past setbacks. From spending time working on the things she can control, such as ball handling and conditioning, to being prepared when healthy, Griffin has managed injuries.
So when she does return this season, Griffin could provide a spark off the bench.
“I know she’s frustrated now,” said Dan Ricci, who coached Griffin at Ossining High in New York. “I talk to her all the time and she just wants to play. She’s dying to play. Hopefully sometime this year she’ll be able to play, I don’t know if that’s possible or not.”
Griffin’s injury history dates back to her high school years.
A week before her sophomore season at Ossining, Griffin tore her ACL while coming down from a layup. Griffin has a high pain tolerance and asked Ricci if she could go back in after sitting out, but the coach instead ushered her to the doctor for an MRI.
When the results came back showing a torn ACL, Ricci was surprised since Griffin hadn’t acted as if she was in immense pain after suffering the injury during the game.
“It was so weird,” Ricci said. “She went for a layup and came down. She said something felt weird. She didn’t cry, she didn’t go on the ground … In my career, I’ve had about 12 kids tear ACLs in football, basketball and lacrosse and she’s the only one I’ve ever seen didn’t cry.”
Griffin sat out that season to allow her knee to completely heal. Yet she never missed a practice or a game. She went to the team’s practice six days a week and sat on a chair off to the sideline, practicing her ball handling skills: dribbling the ball around her legs, under the chair and around her back.
When she regained enough strength to stand and walk, she snuck in some shooting drills to work on her form when the team would leave the court for water breaks.
“She came to practice every single day,” Ricci said. “She wasn’t the greatest ball handler as a freshman, so all she did was sit in a chair and dribble, dribble, dribble. Left hand, right hand, around her back, through her leg, all that stuff for the whole season.”
That extra work done at practices when she was limited helped her recover even faster. After 10 months without basketball, Griffin came back for her junior year as good as before.
“She just completely worked her butt of the
whole time,” Ricci said. “When she came back, no brace, no nothing, and you would think it never happened.”
Ossining lost in the state finals that year with Griffin as a starter.
A year later, however; Griffin again was injured with a high ankle sprain after a player stepped on her foot during practice. She sat out for eight weeks in the middle of the season, still attending each practice and game and conditioning as much as she could from the sideline. She came back at the end of the year and led Ossining to the 2019 state championship title.
“She was the epitome of an injured player,” Ricci said. “Most (injured) kids would come to practice but no kid ever worked as hard as she did. She’d dribble the ball for our whole two-hour practice. She’d be on the wall, dribbling wall balls. She’d be on the ground doing that. Whenever we had a water break, she would run out on the court, when she could run, and shoot. She just loved playing basketball and she just couldn’t wait to get back.”
Griffin ended her high school career with over 2,000 points in two and half years of playing. She was ranked the No. 33 overall recruit of the class of 2019, named a 2019 McDonald’s All-American, and a 2019 WBCA All-American.
After coming to Ricci as a freshman in high school with only a year and a half of basketball experience, Griffin had taken her up and down high school career and grown into a powerhouse of a player.
“When she came to us she was raw but she was extremely athletic. We had a team that had just won a couple state championships and we were missing like one piece and she was that piece,” Ricci said. “She had a couple 50-point games and we never ran a play for her. It was mostly just off the press or off rebounds or stuff like that.
“She was just tenacious, defensively and we had her on the ball, on the press. She played all five positions: she can bring the ball the up, she can play the center, she played everywhere. She just had a knack for the ball.”
Griffin — whose father Adrian played 10 years in the NBA and is an assistant coach with the Toronto Raptors — arrived at UConn in 2019 as the third Ossining player to join the Huskies, following Saniya Chong (2013-17) and Andra Espinoza-Hunter (2017-18). Griffin came off the bench and played in all 32 games as a freshman.
As a sophomore, she started five games and showed growth, finishing as the leader in field goal percentage (52.3 percent), scoring (6.2 points per game) and rebounds (4.8 per game) among the reserves. She was also third on the team with 23 blocks and fourth with 34 steals.
However, she struggled with consistency. From December 2020 through January 2021, she scored in double figures six out of 12 games, yet never scored more than nine points in a single game the rest of the season.
Going into her junior year, Griffin was expected to become more of an option offensively. But she’s yet to get the chance.
After suffering a high ankle sprain in practice during the preseason, an ongoing back injury flared up and has since kept her sidelined.
She’s been staying conditioned — thanks to Peloton battles with the team’s strength and conditioning director Andrea Hudy — and warmed up with the team ahead of its game at Georgia Tech.
However, UConn coach Geno Auriemma said the junior still isn’t where she needs to be in terms of recovery.
“Aubrey has had more tests. The last couple of days, she gave it a shot for a day or two and it just didn’t respond,” Auriemma said last Friday after practice. “I can’t even give you what a timeline looks like as far as Aubrey’s concern.”
UConn, which has lost two of its past three games, is currently on a 10-day break for the holidays. The team will return to Storrs the day after Christmas and host Marquette at the XL Center on Dec. 29. The time off will help every player, not just Griffin, with rest and time away from basketball.
With Mühl and Fudd expected to return after the holidays (Bueckers in February), the team will be hoping Griffin returns with a positive update on her own timeline to help provide depth to the frontcourt.
“I told her (Griffin), you’re gonna have highs and lows,” Ricci said. “I said don’t get too high when it’s going really good and don’t get too low when it’s getting really bad because the college season is a long season and even a game is a long game. So you just gotta hang in there. Things will go your way. … I know they could use her right now with all the injuries that they have. So, I’m hoping she gets back out there soon.”