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The big question for UConn is whether or not Sarah Strong’s recently revealed Achilles issue is 100% fine by November… and all season long as well. | Photo by Stacy Revere/Getty Images
Team: Connecticut Huskies
2025-26 Record: 38-1, 20-0 Big East
2025-26 Big East Finish: First, four games in front of Villanova
Final 2025-26 Rankings
NET: #1
Her Hoop Stats: #2
BartTorvik.com: #1
Postseason? After running the table in the regular season and winning all three games of the Big East tournament by at least 39 points, the Huskies rolled through their first four games of the NCAA tournament, with their Elite Eight victory over Notre Dame going as their closest contest, winning by just 18 points. Things changed when they got to the Final Four, where UConn took a 62-48 loss to South Carolina and Geno Auriemma really made a mess of things with his interactions with Gamecocks head coach Dawn Staley.
Notable Departures: There are two rotation players that have departed the squad, and now they’re both in the WNBA. Azzi Fudd was the #1 pick in the WNBA Draft after averaging 17.3 points, 2.6 rebounds, 3.1 assists, and 2.5 steals per game for the Huskies last season. She went out on a high note after fighting through injuries for a couple of seasons in the middle of her career, getting First Team All-American honors from the Associated Press. She’s moved into the starting lineup for Dallas as of late and if she can wind her three-point shooting up from the obviously very good 38.7% it’s at right now to the 43+% that Fudd was at in her last two years at UConn, the Wings are going to be a force to contend with this season.
The other UConn draft pick was Serah Williams, who went #33 overall in the third round of the draft and ended up in Portland. It can be hard for third round picks to latch on in the WNBA, but with Portland being an expansion team, that’s helped Williams average 10.9 minutes off the bench in 13 appearances out of 17 games. Williams saw her minutes drop big time when she transferred from Wisconsin to Connecticut, but her per-40 production didn’t drop off all that much. In any case, her 17.4 minutes while starting in all 38 of her appearances last season is a notable chunk of on court time that the Huskies have to replace one way or another, even if finding her 6.7 points and 4.4 rebounds might be easier to duplicate.
Notable Returners: The list starts with Sarah Strong, who led UConn in scoring, rebounding, and blocks last year and led the Big East in steals. Not only was she Big East Player of the Year, she was the consensus National Player of the Year, taking home the Wooden Award, the Naismith Award, and POY trophies from both the AP and the USBWA. This is where I point out that on June 17th, we found out that 1) Strong has been held out of summer training activities because 2) she spent all last season dealing with an Achilles tendon issue. Y’all, I don’t care to think about what the difference is between “slightly hobbled Sarah Strong” and “fully powered Sarah Strong.”
Speaking of players that haven’t been doing much this summer, Blanca Quinonez had surgery to repair a shoulder labrum after the season. Yeah, that’s a real bummer, even more so when you remember that she averaged 10.7 points, 3.1 rebounds, 2.1 assists, and 2.0 steals while coming off the bench for 31 games, and that was good enough to make her the Big East Freshman of the Year and Sixth Woman of the Year. As slightly insane as it sounds, Quinonez is UConn’s only other returning double digit scorer.
UConn also returns Ashlynn Shade and KK Arnold from their regular starting five this past season. Both women averaged more than 24 minutes a game, with Shade (7.4 to 6.9) taking the scoring edge and Arnold (team high 4.6 to 2.8) taking the assists edge. Neither woman was an outstanding shooter for the Huskies last year, but Shade’s dropoff from 36% and 41% in her first two years to under 32% this past season is pretty noticeable, especially as UConn is going to have to contend with the loss of Azzi Fudd’s knockdown shooting next season.
That leaves us with (in order of average minutes) Kayleigh Heckel, Allie Ziebell, and Jana El Alfy rounding out the returning rotation players that we saw last season from UConn. Heckel and Ziebell both averaged 18 minutes per game while appearing in all 39 contests, while El Alfy played in 35 games and averaged just over 11 minutes per appearance. All three averaged between four and eight points per game and between 1.8 and 4.4 rebounds per game. Ziebell was actually the second best three-point shooter on the team in terms of shooting percentage, knocking down over 41%, but Heckel wasn’t exactly bad at 38%. I’m a little bit curious about El Alfy’s minutes going down from 16 to 11.4 per game from her freshman year to her sophomore year, but I’m also not going to get myself into the business of challenging the decisions of one of the best coaches to ever do it.
Key Additions: No transfers in sight for the Huskies this season, but there are three freshmen. The one that you have to know is Olivia Vukosa, who is a 6’4” center from Whitestone, New York. 1) She’s a 6’4” center, which is worth taking note of right off the bat, and 2) Vukosa is the #2 prospect in the country according to ESPN’s recruiting rankings. That makes Vukosa the only top 100 prospect out of the trio of freshmen, and it’s a safe bet that we’ll see a pretty decent amount of her right away this season.
It doesn’t jump off the page at you, but Vukosa is going to be the only American freshman on the roster, which might explain the non-top 100 nature of the other two. Jovana Popovic (5’9” guard) hails from Serbia, where she debuted with the senior national team back in 2025 in the FIBA Eurobasket event. She was averaging 26.6 points, 4.8 rebounds, and 7.2 assists for ZKK Art Basket when she signed with the Huskies back in November…. which seems good? Marine Dursus (5’10” guard) is a late addition for the Huskies, with her official signing coming in late May. She was averaging 9.9 points, 2.1 rebounds, and 1.4 assists for Angers in the top league in her native France. Here’s my question: UConn doesn’t add Dursus this late in the game without thinking they need her, right?
Coach: Geno Auriemma, entering his 42nd season in charge in Storrs. He has a record of 1,288 wins and 166 losses, and that differential keeps sounding insane every single time I have to bring it up when I do these summer check-ins. The fact that the numbers keep getting further apart is definitely helping that along here.
Outlook: As long as Sarah Strong’s Achilles tendon stays in one piece, the UConn outlook is great.
The fact that Strong fought through whatever her issue was during the season is probably a good sign that this isn’t a tear waiting to happen, but we’d be foolish to ignore the possibility that a summer of rest and rehab and healing won’t be enough to avoid a major problem. So, if it is enough to avoid a problem, then Connecticut will be good to great next season. They will have the reigning national player of the year who is expected to repeat.
Replacing Azzi Fudd will be a bigger issue than replacing Serah Williams, as you can probably just pump Jana El Alfy’s minutes back up and/or expect Olivia Vukosa to make something of an impact right away. Maybe solving for Fudd’s absence is as simple as Kayleigh Heckel or Allie Ziebell taking on a bigger role. Maybe it’s Kelis Fisher paying off on the promise of being a top 25 prospect who was limited last year on a roster deep with guards that had to play in front of her. Maybe it’s Morgan Cheli returning from a missed season due to injury and reminding everyone why she was a top 15 prospect coming out of high school. Maybe one of the two international freshmen step in and step up right away. The bad news for Geno Auriemma is that he has to replace Azzi Fudd, but the good news on that same issue is that he’s going to have a lot of options to try to get there, which might even include doing it by committee.
This roster is, as listed, going to win the Big East. They will probably spend the entire season in the top 10 of the AP poll if not the top 5. As such, the ceiling is a national championship.
We just have to wonder if we’re going to see Sarah Strong for 30 minutes a night for 40 games to make that happen. She averaged only 27.4 minutes per game last season and only 24.5 minutes in Big East play. From January 23rd onwards, Strong played 30 minutes just five times as it seems very clear that Auriemma and his staff were managing the Achilles issue more than keeping her out of blowouts that were decided. Three of the five 30+ minute outings were UConn’s last three games of the season in the NCAA tournament where she went 38, 39, and 40 minutes…. and the Huskies won their Sweet 16 and Elite 8 games by 21 and 18 points respectively before managing just 48 points in their season ending 14 point loss.
Strong shot just 4-for-16 in the loss to South Carolina.
All credit to the Gamecocks where applicable here, but that makes my point for me: What does UConn look like if they’re getting a sub-par Sarah Strong for long stretches of the 2026-27 season…… or no Sarah Strong at all?
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