Alexa PhilippouMar 31, 2025, 08:00 AM ET
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- Covers ladies’s faculty basketball and the WNBA
- Up to now coated UConn and the WNBA Connecticut Solar for the Hartford Courant
- Stanford graduate and Baltimore local with additional enjoy on the Dallas Morning Information, Seattle Occasions and Cincinnati Enquirer
SPOKANE, Wash. — Within the moments after Saturday’s Candy 16 win over Kansas State, USC gamers gained a unique FaceTime name. JuJu Watkins, the famous person and heartbeat in their workforce, phoned the locker room as her teammates celebrated their giant win, hyping them up after USC had secured consecutive Elite 8 berths for the primary time since 1982-84.
Watkins, accountable for revitalizing the USC ladies’s basketball program after years of dormancy, needed to watch the sport from Los Angeles. The nationwide participant of the yr front-runner sustained a season-ending ACL tear within the Trojans’ second-round NCAA match sport towards Mississippi State, sending shockwaves all through the sports activities international.
Trainer Lindsay Gottlieb’s 2-year-old daughter, Reese, blew kisses to Watkins over the telephone. Puzzled, she requested, “JuJu’s now not harm?” Gottlieb informed her daughter, “No, she’s nonetheless harm, however she’s glad these days and with us.”
Watkins will over again be supporting her Trojans from afar on Monday as No. 1 seed USC faces off towards Paige Bueckers and the No. 2 seed UConn Huskies. This used to be the prospective matchup each and every fan had turned around as quickly because the bracket dropped: a rematch of closing yr’s Elite 8 and a showdown between two of the brightest stars within the sport. If anything else, enthusiasts have been disenchanted the 2 gamers must face each and every different at that degree of the match and each could not play in Tampa.
That pleasure stays, but if the groups take the courtroom Monday night time, it would possibly not be the similar sport everybody used to be hoping for — UConn integrated.
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Trainer Geno Auriemma and Bueckers relate greater than maximum to the catch 22 situation USC and Watkins face. UConn has handled a slew of season-ending accidents over the last few years, together with to Bueckers. After profitable nationwide participant of the yr as a freshman, she sat out maximum of her sophomore season as a result of a tibial plateau fracture and meniscus tear. The next summer time she tore her ACL and sat out the 2022-23 season.
It wasn’t a marvel, then, that Auriemma and affiliate head trainer Chris Dailey have been a number of the first to succeed in out to Gottlieb within the hours after Watkins’ damage. Bueckers reached out to Watkins, telling newshounds “our center breaks for her.” She introduced “no matter she wishes, mentally, bodily, if she must vent, ask questions.”
“They have got been thru this,” Gottlieb mentioned, “and I feel you do not really feel it until you could have felt it sooner than in that method.”
Auriemma and Bueckers have skilled firsthand the ups and downs of the rehab procedure and what it takes to come back out at the different aspect.
“If you are a competitor, if you are any individual like Paige, any individual like JuJu, or one of the crucial different youngsters that experience long gone thru this, they arrive again higher,” Auriemma mentioned. “They arrive again more potent, they arrive again extra made up our minds, extra resilient, extra working out that they may be able to struggle thru issues and triumph over absolutely anything.”
Bueckers agreed.
“You aren’t getting to be as excellent as JuJu in case you do not need a really perfect motor, a really perfect paintings ethic, and she will assault this procedure simply as she’s attacked basketball,” she mentioned. “And simply as she’s nice at basketball, she will be nice at this restoration procedure. Disenchanted for her however know she will likely be again higher than ever, and this may occasionally simply be slightly setback to the good tale she can have.”
For Bueckers, a force to be nice — a shared high quality that made her and Watkins stars within the first position — helped her jump again more potent than ever. On this match, she has scored 74 issues over the last two video games — together with a career-high 40 within the Candy 16 on Saturday — whilst boasting the highest assist-to-turnover ratio within the nation and taking pictures splits of 50-40-90 potency.
And now, along with her days in a UConn jersey coming to an finish, Auriemma and Gottlieb mentioned they see a celeb taking part in with a better sense of urgency as she tries to win a championship, which will be the program’s first since 2016.
“You check out to not take into consideration the stakes or the force or attending to the Ultimate 4,” Bueckers mentioned. “Clearly that is there, so that you check out to not take into consideration it and simply cross out and play each and every unmarried sport the similar method adore it’s your closing, adore it’s a very powerful 40 mins of your lifestyles. … We simply need the season to stay going so long as imaginable. So leaving not anything as much as likelihood, giving it our all in favour of that 40 mins to play for every other 40 is our workforce mindset.”
The closing time those groups met, in past due December, the Trojans received 72-70 regardless of blowing an 18-point lead. This time, each groups will appearance other: Watkins scored 25 issues towards the Huskies and UConn guard Azzi Fudd performed simplest 8 mins. It used to be her first sport again after tweaking her knee previous that month, and 6th sport total since coming back from her ACL tear in November 2023. The sharpshooter — the workforce’s second-leading scorer within the postseason at 15.3 issues in line with sport — mentioned Sunday that during retrospect she wasn’t able to play that sport, however since discovering her groove over the last few months, she has felt like a “totally other participant [with a] totally other mindset.”
The Trojans also are finding their new truth, although they are transparent that the purpose hasn’t modified: securing this system’s first Ultimate 4 since 1986 and nationwide championship since 1984. It is simply that the trail to attaining the ones targets appears to be like other now.
USC will appearance to play extra thru senior Kiki Iriafen, its prized switch portal addition whom Gottlieb calls some of the easiest gamers within the nation. And he or she does not must do it by myself. This workforce used to be at all times making plans to depend closely on its freshman elegance after the commencement of its trio of Ivy League switch starters from closing season. The Trojans believed of their beginners all season, Gottlieb mentioned; now they’re simply being requested to play relatively greater roles than anticipated.
The way in which that staff has competed within the absence of Watkins — Kennedy Smith and Avery Howell by myself mixed for 37 issues towards Kansas State — simplest reiterated to Gottlieb that they are “winners above the entirety else.”
The truth is that each and every workforce is solely 40 mins clear of the Ultimate 4. That is why Auriemma has lengthy mentioned that is the hardest sport of the match.
The Huskies have enjoy on their aspect with 5 gamers who’ve performed in an Elite 8, together with Bueckers and Fudd; USC, with out Watkins, has simplest two, together with just one starter in Rayah Marshall. However possibly the Trojans — who’ve heard all those that counted them out as soon as Watkins went down — get pleasure from a loss of force on them.
Whoever is in a position to take care of the force of this second — whether or not it’s Bueckers, Fudd and the remainder of the Huskies hungry for that elusive championship, or Iriafen, Smith and Howell taking part in for each themselves and their injured teammate — will make all of the distinction.
“Some gamers are going to upward push to the instance, and a few are going to shrink,” Auriemma mentioned. “It is simply the character of it.”
