UConn’s women look ready for another big March, and Sarah Strong looks ready for superstardom

UNCASVILLE, Conn. — There are plenty of talented teams in women’s college basketball this season. And as the major conference tournaments over the weekend showed, there’s a clear elite: Connecticut from the Big East, UCLA from the Big Ten, and South Carolina and Texas from the SEC.

But while those teams are loaded, deep, and great to watch, it sometimes feels like there’s a little bit of star power missing. Not a lack of talent, to be clear, but the extra intangible that grows from a mix of play on the floor and the media’s attention.

Perhaps that attention was harder to come by in February, thanks to the Olympics starting right as the NFL ended. Nor did it help that Southern Cal’s JuJu Watkins is out with a torn ACL, in the season when she would have inherited the spotlight from Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers.

And while South Jersey native Hannah Hidalgo has kept filling up box scores at Notre Dame, the squad has fallen from the top. The Fighting Irish finished fifth in the ACC regular season and fell to top-seeded Duke in the conference tournament’s semifinals. (Hidalgo’s former backcourt mate, Olivia Miles, won the bet she made on herself by transferring to Texas Christian, winning the Big 12 regular season and making the tournament final.)

Now it’s March, though, and that’s always college basketball’s time. So here come Joyce Edwards and Raven Johnson’s Gamecocks, Madison Booker and Rori Harmon’s Longhorns, and Lauren Betts and Kiki Rice’s Bruins.

And here, once again, come the Huskies.

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They’ve got nine players who play more than 10 minutes per game. They’ve got veteran leadership in fifth-year senior guard Azzi Fudd, a potential No. 1 WNBA draft pick (if there’s a season), and junior forward KK Arnold.

They just wrapped up not only their sixth straight Big East double title — as in, every one since they returned to the conference in 2021 — but their first undefeated season in eight years. The last time they went undefeated all the way was 2015-16, Breanna Stewart’s senior season.

“I think it’s a great accomplishment, what we’ve been able to achieve so far this year,” Fudd said. “We have a couple days off, so we want to enjoy that, celebrate that, but like you said, our work isn’t done yet. So as much as we can enjoy this win, enjoy being undefeated this season — being undefeated, being a Big East champion, [it] won’t really matter in a couple weeks.”

Now it’s on to the final puzzle pieces. One is a national championship, to be settled from Selection Sunday through April 5. The other will come when the spotlight goes on, and that should happen sooner.

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As great of a team as UConn is, and as important as Fudd and Arnold are, Sarah Strong is a force like no other in the game. This March feels like the time for her to officially become that player.

It’s not just that the sophomore forward averages 18.5 points, 7.6 rebounds, 4.1 assists, 3.4 steals, and 1.6 blocks against just 1.8 turnovers and 1.6 fouls. It’s how she moves around the floor, in the post or at the arc, as comfortable driving the lane as letting fly a three.

“It’s a lot of God-given — how does somebody know how to hit a 100 mph fastball? They just can, and she does things because she can,” Huskies coach Geno Auriemma said. “She’s just really, really smart, really intuitive, and big enough that you can’t bully her and quick enough that you can’t out-quick her. So it’s a rare combination, for sure.”

Auriemma saw it as soon as he started recruiting Strong in high school. Her talents were no secret, nor were the genes that helped. Her mother, Allison Feaster, led Harvard’s famed 16-over-1 upset of Stanford in 1996, then played for three WNBA teams in 10 seasons and several more in Europe. She’s now an executive with the Boston Celtics. Her father, Danny Strong, played at N.C. State.

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“Her physical things, yeah, being able to pass it and shoot it and dribble it and rebound the ball and steal it and all the other stuff,” Auriemma said. “But I saw right away that she sees things that other people don’t see. I’ve had a couple of those, so when I first saw it, I knew exactly what I was looking at.”

But it still had to come together in college, and it did. Strong was the national freshman of the year, capping it with 24 points, 15 rebounds, and five assists in UConn’s demolition of South Carolina in the championship game. Now she’s six wins from a second straight title.

Auriemma invoked a phrase he learned from another of the game’s masters, Bob Knight.

“You can teach players to look, but you can’t teach them to see,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of players in college basketball today, you tell them to look for this, and they don’t even know what you’re talking about. She sees things before they happen, and she knows things before they present themselves.”

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As impressive as UConn’s offense is, its snarling defense is just as impressive. All the low scores it has held opponents to aren’t just because of stage fright-induced misses.

“Defensively, we’re able to be more disruptive than we have been in maybe the last 10 years,” Auriemma said, a span that includes greats like Bueckers, Nika Mühl, Aaliyah Edwards, Napheesa Collier, Katie Lou Samuelson, and Gabby Williams.

But asked if this team is better than last year’s, the one that finally delivered Bueckers her national championship, Auriemma wouldn’t go there.

“It’s a much different team than it was last year,” he said. “I’m not of the opinion that we’re better — we’re different. So there is no, ‘Are we the same? Are we better? Are we worse?’ We’re different, and we play a different style of play than we played last year.”

The results are the same so far, though. In fact, they’re even better, since last year’s team had three losses.

“When we’re on our game, we’re as effective as we were last year at this time, for sure,” Auriemma said.

The truest measure of that is coming next.