TAMPA, Fla. — On the keen, soulful UConn women’s basketball internet, Azzi Fudd is “the people’s princess.” She carries herself with regal grace. She’s kind to her young superfans. By teammates’ accounts, she can do no wrong in the eyes of Geno Auriemma. But even fairytales have dark beginnings. A poison apple (or poison Brussels sprouts) marred Fudd’s first trip to the national championship game in her freshman season. As a junior, she was cursed with a second ACL tear in five years, this one right after teammate Paige Bueckers tore hers. “To say that these four years have not gone according to plan or according to how we thought it would go, I would say, is to put it lightly,” Fudd said with a chuckle on Saturday afternoon, calm but hungry before the national championship game.
On Sunday, the princess rescued herself and brought some peace to the kingdom. Fudd logged 24 points, five rebounds and three steals in an 82-59 win over South Carolina that gave UConn the program’s 12th NCAA championship and its first in nine years. For her vital two-way play in Sunday’s game and in Friday’s game against UCLA, the redshirt junior was voted the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player.
On the court after the game, Fudd’s father, Tim, said he’d just watched “pre-injury Azzi,” the strong and explosive guard whose textbook jumper once made her the No. 1 recruit in the country. Fudd often refers to herself in the adjectival third-person. “Freshman Azzi is gone,” she told The Athletic before her sophomore year. This weekend, she rued “Tennessee Azzi,” who was a non-factor when the Vols upset the Huskies in Knoxville in February.
Tournament Azzi, pre-injury Azzi—whatever you want to call her—shone on both sides of the ball. In the Elite Eight against USC, she spent some time guarding 6-foot-3 Kiki Iriafen and 6-foot-5 Rayah Marshall, her strength enough to match their size. A few nights later, she was locking up UCLA’s 5-foot-11 point guard Kiki Rice in the Final Four. A clean sweep of Kikis.
South Carolina guard Raven Johnson said before the game that the Gamecocks would need to force Fudd off the three-point line—not because she can’t score from elsewhere, but mostly because twos are worth fewer points. Fudd read their closeouts well, running into midrange pullups and driving to the rim so that she scored the first 21 of her points without making a three. “The thing that makes UConn is how good they are at the mid-range. They truly are efficient at all three levels, which very few teams are at the rate that they do it,” UCLA head coach Cori Close pointed out after her team’s loss to UConn on Friday.
South Carolina had no defensive answers for the trio of Fudd, freshman Sarah Strong, and Bueckers. Fudd and Strong tied for the team high in scoring, and Bueckers finished with 17 points on what was a fairly quiet night for her. The Gamecocks could hardly punch back on offense either: the team's starting forwards struggled against Strong's length. MiLaysia Fulwiley, who'd been an instant shot of offense at other points in the season, was mostly an instant shot of turnovers. For the first time in a very long time, Dawn Staley and the Gamecocks were on the side of less talent. “They’re good. They work well together. Super unselfish. They’re incredibly skilled,” she said after the game. “I think they had the better team this year. It’s not that you always win when you have the better team. But they had the better team this year and they won. And that's what you're supposed to do.”
If the game distinguished Real Azzi from the hobbled impostors of big games past, it also did the same for UConn, which was finally in a state to end their championship drought marked by buzzer beaters, fragile ligaments, and a pandemic. Auriemma said this weekend that while 12 championships probably wouldn’t mean much more for him than 11, he wanted this one badly for Bueckers and Fudd, whom he had promised championship glory when they were teenagers.
“I just kept thinking, you know, I kind of owe it to these people to let me see if we can take a whole team, what could happen,” Auriemma said. “Because these people that have been playing against us for the last seven, eight years have not played a University of Connecticut team.” In the five years since Bueckers stepped on campus, the Huskies roster has been bizarrely snakebitten, suffering 12 season-ending injuries since 2021. “Life is about overcoming adversity and finding your way, and they instill a level of toughness in these kids that makes them—they’re just different,” Tim Fudd told me amid the celebration, a FUDD AROUND AND FIND OUT T-shirt slung over his shoulder. “Whether they were winning this game or not, they’re different. They handle themselves differently and they approach things differently than I’ve ever seen.”
For Bueckers, the championship really is a tidy ending; she's expected to be the first-overall selection in the WNBA Draft next week. Fudd announced before the tournament began that she'll return to UConn for a fourth season. “Coming off this, this team’s confidence is going to be higher than ever,” she said after the game. A new reign begins.
