The real Azzi Fudd? 'None of you have seen it'

05.11.2025, 02:05 espn.com

AZZI FUDD LOOKS over her cards and refers to my handwritten instructions for a game called Dinger that she has never played before this early October morning. Wearing gray sweatpants with a pink sweatshirt at UConn's practice facility, she recalls how she spent her childhood summers playing Uno and other card games at her grandparents' lake house in Minnesota. She tells me how she quickly picked up the game of Spades last summer while she was waiting in an airport lounge in China with Stephen Curry.

Fudd squints at her hand, looks up and then starts laying down cards, one after the other.

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.

Barely five minutes into our game, she lays down her final card. She smiles.

"Done."

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.

She walked into the sunroom of the "cottage" where her dad, Tim, was working. She told her parents she had made a decision about her future.

Azzi had already spoken with UConn coach Geno Auriemma about her plans. He had asked her questions about her goals. What the benefits were if she left UConn for the WNBA after the season ended. What they would be if she stayed.

"And through all these question-and-answers that we asked, that I asked, she said, 'I'm not ready,'" Auriemma says. "'I haven't played enough basketball to feel confident about going there and playing at the highest level.'"

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.

She was healthier but not necessarily happier.

"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 and Katie often discuss among themselves what they see in their daughter on the court. They noticed times when she disappeared in a corner and seemed to take herself out of a game. They wondered how her recovery was progressing both mentally and physically. They were curious how their daughter felt about moving on to the WNBA versus running it back in Connecticut for one more season.

"We're not even having these conversations during the season," Tim says. "But we're kind of allowing her to kind of figure this out. And also, we don't hear about stuff that's going on. She doesn't tell us things. She's very protective of the sanctity of what they have going on, and she keeps that separate."

Through tears, Fudd told her parents about the struggles she'd had that season, how she wasn't trusting her knee and her recovery. The wobble in December against Louisville that knocked her out for three games with a knee sprain gave her pause. She felt unsure, tentative on the court for much of the season.

"It was like, 'What am I even doing out here?'" Fudd says. "'Why even sub in?'"

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.'"

"'This is NCAA tournament me,'" Katie adds.

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.

Fudd catches the ball in the corner. As soon as the ball hits her hands, she is ready to shoot. After letting it fly, she sprints to the opposite corner for another catch-and-shoot. Then back to the other corner for a dribble pull-up. She crosses the court again for another pull-up. On her third trip to each corner, she plays live one-on-one against a defender. Then she repeats the drill around the arc. She gets three points for each 3-pointer made, two points for the pull-ups and one for scoring on the defender. Forty-two is the highest possible score. Brickley requires the NBA players he trains to score 28 points before they can move on to a different drill.

"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 give