Katie BarnesNov 4, 2025, 07:00 AM ETCloseKatie Barnes is a writer/reporter for ESPN.com. Follow them on Twitter at Katie_Barnes3.Follow on X
Azzi Fudd’s top plays from the 2024-25 season (1:59)Relive some of UConn guard Azzi Fudd’s top highlights from last season. (1:59)
The 5-foot-11 guard led UConn to its 12th national championship last season and was named Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four. Since then, she wowed at New York Fashion Week, launched a podcast, took a Caribbean cruise and hobnobbed with Curry on the other side of the globe.
She spent the summer much as she has spent every other summer, working to perfect a game that has peaked mostly in quiet gyms in front of well-trained eyes.
Now, after deciding the WNBA can wait, Fudd is back in Storrs, dropping cards as if they’re burning her fingers. She wants all the minutes she can get during her final season in college after knee and foot injuries cut short her first three years. She wants to help UConn become the first repeat champion since the Huskies won four in a row from 2013 to 2016. “Obviously,” she says. She wants to get more vocal on the court and more versatile with the ball.
Mostly, she wants to show the world the Azzi Fudd that only a select few have seen. “Hearts,” Fudd calls out.
IN MARCH, THE weekend before the 2025 NCAA tournament started, Fudd drove out to her grandparents’ house in rural Connecticut, not too far from Storrs, to meet her parents.
In her first three seasons at UConn, Fudd played in just 42 games. She hurt a foot as a freshman and aggravated a knee as a sophomore. She tore her right ACL (for the second time) and the medial meniscus as a junior and missed all but two games. Her fourth season had been healthier. Heading into the 2025 NCAA tournament, she had played in 28 of the Huskies’ 34 games, averaging 12.8 points and shooting 43.4% from 3-point range.
“There was a phase where I just didn’t enjoy playing,” Fudd says. “Which was weird, because I never really felt that way.”
She didn’t think she was making the right reads. Shots weren’t falling. Her confidence was plummeting.
Fudd wanted to go back to Storrs to continue to hone her game and her brain, and that was the message she planned to deliver to her parents.
Tim had seen that version of his daughter before, back when he was on the staff at St. John’s College High School in Washington, D.C. It was during her senior season, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lots of schools were closed, games were uncertain, and Azzi was still working her way back from tearing an ACL and MCL in the spring of her sophomore year.
St. John’s traveled to Richmond, Virginia, and was in a tight game with 10 seconds left. Fudd, the No. 1 recruit in the nation, caught the ball at the top of the key. “Her spot,” Tim says. Instead of letting the ball fly, she passed it to a freshman who fumbled it out of bounds. St. John’s lost the game.
“I was just like, ‘What the F are you doing?'” Tim recalls. “‘You passed the ball to a freshman? That’s a shot you’ve made time and time again. That’s unacceptable.'”
After they left the gym, Tim took Azzi’s hand and asked if she was hungry. With so many restaurants closed, they went to Walmart and found some food to heat up. When they got back into the car, Tim asked Azzi if she was mad at him. Azzi told him no, that she needed the tough love.
In the cottage that March afternoon, she no longer needed that push from her parents. She’d arrived at the decision herself. She wasn’t done with college basketball, but the uncertainty, the hiding, she was done with that.
“You’re grateful that you go through that,” Fudd says, “because then you realize just how resilient or how strong you are and what you’re capable of after the fact.”
Her parents saw the confidence grow within her during that conversation. They watched her move on in real time.
“The tears, they’re drying up as she’s talking,” Tim says. “‘That’s the old me. This is the new me.'”
During the NCAA tournament, Fudd averaged 17.5 points and 3.0 steals, while shooting 44.4% from beyond the arc. She struggled shooting the ball during both the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight but recovered to drop 19 points in the national semifinals and 24 in the championship game. She was named the Most Outstanding Player after Connecticut’s 82-59 win over South Carolina in the final.
“The key for this season is having the Final Four Azzi be consistently there for five months,” Auriemma says. “And that’s the next phase in her transition from being who she was to who [and] what she wants to be in her last year here.”
It was a glimpse of the player her dad knew was always there. And the player he expects to see throughout the upcoming season.
“At the end of the championship game, I was like, ‘All of you have not seen it, none of you have seen it,'” Tim says. “That is Azzi Fudd.”
IT’S A MONTH after Fudd lifted the championship trophy in Tampa, Florida, and she is sweating and sprinting in a New York gym. Renowned skills trainer Chris Brickley, who also works with the likes of Kevin Durant, Trae Young and Paige Bueckers, is running her through one of his go-to drills.
“It’s six, seven minutes of straight running, shooting, live basketball,” Brickley says. “Super hard drill.”
This is Fudd’s third consecutive day with Brickley. They’ve been doing two sessions per day, and Brickley expects Fudd to start to feel the effects of the workouts. Her first time through the drill, she scores 27. Brickley runs her through it again. This time her score is a 26. Fudd does it again. She scores 27 again. On the sixth time, she breaks through for a 36.
“Any player that I’ve ever worked with at that point would be like, ‘All right, today I couldn’t get it,'” Brickley says. “That takes some mental toughness and ridiculous mindset to even push yourself through that much to get that number.”
This version of Azzi Fudd is legendary in Brickley’s gym and in the gym of Brandon Payne, who trains Curry and began working with Fudd after she and Cameron Brink became the first two girls to attend the SC30 Select Camp in 2018.
Fudd stood out to Payne immediately. The staff was setting up a scrimmage, and Fudd and Brink were given the option to compete against the boys. Among them were future NBA players Anthony Edwards, Jalen Suggs, Jalen Green and Cole Anthony.
“Azzi immediately hopped in, and not only did she hop in, but she was attacking, and she was scoring right off the bat,” Payne says. “I knew right then, immediately, this is somebody that’s different. She was still a sophomore in high school. And she’s hopping out there and competing and not only looks the part but is having great success immediately.”
That was the Azzi Fudd who became the first high school sophomore to win Gatorade National Player of the Year. That was the Azzi Fudd who had full confidence in her knees. That was the Azzi Fudd who looked like she could be a multiple National Player of the Year candidate in college. That was the Azzi Fudd before the injuries gave way to doubt.
“Nobody trains better, nobody approaches every drill better, no one gives more than the effort that she gives you every single day,” Auriemma says. “So from that respect, when she’s had the opportunity to, and the ability to, she’s just been unbelievably good. It just hasn’t carried over into games because you need a lot of game-time action. You need to play a lot in order to really play at a certain level.”
Fudd has shown flashes. She scored 25 points on 7-of-9 shooting from 3-point range as a freshman against Tennessee. She opened her sophomore season with a stretch of games in which she hung 32 points on Texas, another 32 on NC State and then 24 points on Iowa, all of whom were ranked in the top 10. And, of course, there was the national championship game where she helped UConn break free from South Carolina with 13 first-half points and was named Final Four Most Outstanding Player.
“Each year there were glimpses,” Auriemma says. “I don’t even know that she has seen the Azzi that could be for an extended period of time. I’m really hoping that this year she’s able to sustain it and stay healthy and stay in that moment where she feels like she’s got everything under control.”
FUDD WRITES AFFIRMATIONS before most games. She sits on the bus, takes out her phone and jots her thoughts on the Notes app.
Last season, she started working with a sports psychologist for the first time. She learned that the way she communicates with herself can complicate her mission. “I found out I judge myself a lot,” she says. “So I’ve been working on noticing things and not judging, and having rational responses instead of emotional responses.”
Instead of focusing on something being “wrong” when she misses a few shots, she focuses on how she missed them. Why she missed them. Were they long? Were they short? Did she get enough lift? How can she adjust her movements to be more successful?
“Those kinds of things were helpful,” she says. “And just finding different ways to handle situations. I feel like that’s been such a game changer.”
In August, she went to China with Curry to help run his camp and attend CurryCon. She was shocked not only by the outpouring for Curry, but also that some people knew who she was and admired her game. People camped out at the hotel gym where Curry and Fudd were staying in the hopes of seeing the NBA star. When Fudd came down one morning, fans gave her gifts and asked for her autograph.
“It was just this aha moment of, ‘Wow, maybe I am a little popular,'” Katie Fudd says. “To me that’s a blossoming of realizing how good she actually is.”
With a microphone taped to her cheek while helping to lead camp sessions, Fudd increasingly became more comfortable in the spotlight.
“Sometimes, I do sit back and I’m like, ‘How is my life real?'” Fudd says. “I am so blessed, so lucky.”
“When she’s confident, in a good space, healthy, I really don’t think that there’s anyone in women’s basketball, period, that can shoot the ball better than she can shoot it,” he says. “I think she’s going to finish off college on a really high note.”