Copyright Hartford Courant
STORRS — It seems like a lifetime ago, when Ayanna Patterson decided she wanted to be part of the UConn women’s basketball culture. Recruited during the pandemic, she couldn’t even make an official visit to campus, but she didn’t have to. After watching the Huskies play at Butler, near her hometown of Fort Wayne, Ind., she knew what she wanted. “It solidified everything that I wanted to do,” Patterson said, after committing to UConn in February 2021. “When you watch them play, it’s like, ‘OK, now I see everything they’re doing on TV.’” Then the story that was to become all too familiar at the Werth Center began to unfold for Patterson, too. The injuries. The surgeries. The rehab and the redshirting. “It’s hard, it’s been very difficult on her,” Geno Auriemma said. “She basically hasn’t played in three years almost. How do you get better unless you get a lot of reps in games? How do you improve? How do you get confident playing in games?” Dom Amore’s Sunday Read: Broadway debut for Wolf Pack voice, Hurley-Izzo mutual admiration, and more In what would normally be the start of her senior season, Patterson will try to launch her UConn career all over again when the Huskies play Louisville at Annapolis, Md. in the season opener on Tuesday night, the eve of her 22nd birthday. “It’s going to feel great,” Patterson said after practice Friday, “just being officially back, being officially healthy and playing in my first official game, it’s huge. It’s very special to be surrounded by my teammates, my coaches and my family will for sure be a special moment for me.” It has been so long, actually, that when Patterson was sent into the preseason game against Boston College at Mohegan Sun Oct. 23, she went to the wrong place to check in for her eight-minute stint. “Hopefully, this time I’m going to check in with the right person,” she said. Patterson, 6 feet 2, first checked in at UConn will a stuffed resume, all the right skills and decorations, a consensus top-five recruit, maybe the best at her position in the Class of 2022, McDonald’s, Jordan Brand and SLAM All-American, Indiana’s Miss Basketball. Stardom seemed just a matter of time. But chronic knee troubles dogged her from the moment she stepped on campus. She got into 27 games as a freshman, averaging 9.6 minutes, showing flashes of her immense potential before the pain and soreness slowed her. Ultimately, surgery was decided upon and she missed the entire 2023-24 season. Ready to return a year ago, she injured her shoulder, and when non-surgical approaches didn’t work, she underwent another season-ending surgery. “(Doubts) are always in the back or your mind,” Patterson said, “but every day I have lived for trying to get back to where I was and who I was before this, before the injuries. That was the biggest motivator, to have that marked on my calendar, Nov. 4, that was the ultimate test of getting there, being healthy enough to get there.” Now Nov. 4 is here and Patterson appears healthy and ready to resume, to get the UConn experience for which she has worked and signed on. ‘This isn’t the end of my story’: How UConn’s Caroline Ducharme made it back on the court “Of course, I’m going to be knocking rust off for the whole season,” she said. “When you don’t play for that long, it takes a while to get back used to playing basketball competitively, with contact and everything. My biggest thing is getting my legs up under me, getting in shape, getting in condition, and letting the game come to me and the cards fall where they fall.” For so many like Ayanna Patterson, the cards have not always been kind. Paige Bueckers lost most of two seasons to knee injuries, but returned for a fifth season to get what she came for, the championship. Azzi Fudd also missed big chunks of multiple seasons, but got her championship and is now back for a fifth year, looking to show what she can do when she’s fully healthy, with a full off-season to prepare. Aubrey Griffin’s career was disrupted by injuries again and again, but she made it back to play a role in the championship chase in her sixth season of college ball. And Caroline Ducharme, who has been fighting the affects of multiple concussions, is hoping to continue her comeback just as Patterson launches hers. “Of course, Caroline she helped me along the way with everything,” Patterson said, “just keeping me motivated, keeping me confident, and my family did a tremendous job of keeping me grounded, getting me out of those low spaces. I have a lot of basketball still to play, and that’s the biggest thing my coaches harped on. No matter what, they knew that, despite those two years, there’s a lot of basketball left in my lifetime.” The dream is still there, but a lot changes have happened at UConn over the course of 944 days, the time that has passed since Patterson last played in a game that counted, one minute against Ohio State in the NCAA Tournament on March 25, 2023. Players come, players go. As Patterson’s career, at least the on-court, game-experience part, was frozen in time, UConn, defending national champs, ranked No. 1 as the season begins, has brought in waves out standout recruits from all over the world, including several forwards. With Patterson, as with Griffin and Ducharme last season, the coaches must balance the urge to reward a player for all the hardship and hard work it took to recover, while distributing minutes by what’s best for the team. “You’re older, but you’re not an older, mature, confident, experienced player because you haven’t played,” Auriemma said. “And now you’ve got all these young guys coming in, and guy who (hasn’t) played a lot of basketball, it’s difficult for somebody like that to just jump in and, boom. It’s a long recovery, and even longer to get acclimated back into that. What I see every day is, Ayanna’s energy level hasn’t changed, her approach hasn’t changed, the frustration obviously comes out, but from a coaching standpoint all you can do is keep putting her out there and encouraging her, ‘show us what you’re made of,’ and all those things have not changed.” Dom Amore: UConn football gets back in the bowl business, but this time it’s business as usual Patterson’s athletic ability could become a factor in defense, rebounding, getting after loose balls, and she has occasionally made Auriemma say “wow” during practice. It took a lot to get this far, to stay with this UConn dream this long. No one knows how this story will end, but it must begin, all over again, somewhere. “My biggest thing, being injured the last two years, I didn’t want that to be what was written about my college career,” Patterson said. “So I kind of want to write my own story, and write it in the write way, about how my college career will go. Write a healthy story. It’s whatever the universe and God wants me to do. I can’t really write a table of contents to the rest of my story.”
