The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
‘Superstar’ status
Edwards played like an All-American in leading Huskies
UNCASVILLE — Aaliyah Edwards’ teammates started rubbing her head and pushing her toward the front of the stage before the award was even announced, and Big East commissioner Val Ackerman soon tried to lend some formality to the proceedings.
“She averaged 19 points and 13 rebounds a game,” Ackerman began over the loudspeaker, but the crowd roared, drowning out the rest of her words. Edwards, named the most outstanding player at the Big East Tournament, had already come forward, standing before of a group of players she has led, steady from the front, throughout a season like few, or none, before it.
The UConn women’s basketball team cruised to a 67-56 victory over Villanova in the championship game Monday night and the scene at Mohegan Sun Area was colored, like the air filled with confetti, by the celebrations of people who had ridden out something so challenging.
Coach Geno Auriemma, having endured much personal and professional consternation in recent months, danced with his grandchildren. Players hugged and huddled and ran around the casino court as if it were a playground. The Huskies’ best overall player, Edwards, was singled out for her brilliant post play, a clickclick-click, machine-like performance over three days that loosened up everyone around her.
She had 19 points and 13 rebounds against Georgetown.
She had 20 points and 12 rebounds against Marquette.
She had 19 points and 15 rebounds against Villanova — and guarded, aggressively and successfully, the nation’s top scorer in Maddy Siegrist.
When UConn was done dominating this tournament, Auriemma mentioned Edwards as one of the Big East’s few “superstars.”
Fellow post player Dorka Juhász called Edwards “a nightmare on offense and defense.”
And the whole event took on the comfort of a pleasant dream.
Not because the Huskies haven’t been in this position before — they almost always are — but because they had never been
through what late 2022 and early 2023 tossed at them.
Now a week after Auriemma offered up an ominously bleak assessment of his team following a flat performance against Xavier in the regular season finale, that team is a conference champion. Seven months after Paige Bueckers went down with a torn ACL that would cost her the season, those players are conference champions. Three months after the death of his mother, an emotional and physical blow that Auriemma needed considerable time to recover from, that coach is a conference champion. Again.
“To still come out with the same outcome that we wanted coming into the season is amazing,” Edwards said.
UConn stamped something and sent it into history Monday. Only the most important part of the 2022-23 season remains — the NCAA Tournament, of course — and Monday was an opportunity to appreciate how everyone handled the road traveled. There was joy, Auriemma said, where sometimes there is only relief.
“It almost felt like a chapter had been closed,” he said. “Sit back now and really let everything wash over you that you’ve been holding in. So many things have happened on and off the court this past season – personally, teamwise, everything — that to get to this point, you want to just close that book and now start a brand-new one starting next Sunday. And that book ended the right way. It had a lot of acts and a lot of tragedies and a lot of ups and downs, a lot of stuff, but the book ended the right way. And now it’s time for a new one.”
Auriemma was on stage, the championship press conference. Later he was sitting at a locker elsewhere in the arena, likening the season to a Shakespearean play, all the highs and lows that came to pass with various injuries, early success, late struggles and then a three-day performance in the conference tournament that was about as could be expected.
“I always thought, if we’re going to have to suffer through all this, there’s got to be something good at the end,” Auriemma said. “That’s what I kept saying to the team. With everything that happened, that was going bad, I said nobody deserves to be dealt this hand so there must be something at the end. That river card needed to come up and ace.”
The hole cards, flop and turn had dealt Auriemma some of the most uncertain times of his career. Yet through it all, Edwards, a junior, was building a season that wound up setting both her career and her team back on course.
She is averaging 16.6 points, a team high, and 9.2 rebounds, second to Juhász’ 10. She leads the Huskies in field goal percentage (57.3) and blocks (39), and she is just one of two players (with Lou Lopez Sénéchal) to play 34 games.
Edwards’ play had been celebrated earlier in the week, when she was named the Big East’s most improved player. The award is a compliment, for sure, but also in effect a retroactive label placed upon her sophomore season: not great.
Edwards had set a remarkably high bar as a freshman in 2020-21, averaging 10.7 points, 5.7 rebounds and 21.8 minutes — and making 27 of 37 shots in the NCAA Tournament as UConn reached another Final Four. After spending much of the offseason in training, and then at the Olympics, with Team Canada, she regressed at bit in her second year at UConn, averaging 7.9 points, 5.1 rebounds and 24.9 minutes.
She just never looked like herself.
Then she became the face of what the team needed in trustworthiness, resilience, something of an anchor at times when the boat was rocking. UConn’s main goals were never out of sight, even if they temporarily felt unattainable, and now the team heads to the national stage feeling as good about what it’s doing as it has since November.
Azzi Fudd has returned, spacing everything from opposing defenses to UConn’s minutes distribution. Auriemma knew what he’d get out of Sénéchal and Nika Mühl in the backcourt. Up front, there were questions — questions now answered — about the extent to which Edwards and Juhász could impact stretches of games.
“The real honest answer is I just had my fingers crossed from the very first day of practice,” Auriemma said. “And I kept my fingers crossed through the entire season.”
UConn is five months into this, five really trying months, and at the tail end Edwards is … making her first six shots to stake UConn to a 31-24 lead over the No. 10 team in the nation in the conference championship game, then darting a pass to a streaking Sénéchal for a layup and a nine-point lead … Forcing Villanova to burn another timeout after scoring on the fastbreak, on a lead pass from Mühl, to make it 44-29 with 6:09 left in the third quarter … Backing down Siegrist for a bucket that made it 67-49 ... Slashing to the basket, making jump shots, playing with edge and efficiency . ... Making 25 of 41 shots in the the tournament.
“Obviously,” Juhász said, “her confidence is out the roof.”
Auriemma called it an “All-American performance,” the way Edwards went on rebounding tears and attacked the basket.
All-Americans get singled out on stage. AllAmericans make a team feel a certain way through one project and on the way to the next. The Huskies played their best basketball, goofed around because they deserved to and pushed their best player to the front of the stage so she could be cheered by thousands of fans, out in front, where Edwards remains.
“There’s an element she brings that, if you don’t have that element it’s hard to win tournament championships,” Auriemma said. “It’s hard to win in the postseason.”