Copyright The Boston Globe
For the Milton native and Noble & Greenough graduate, this season is a testament to her will, to her resolve, to her courage, resilience, and dedication. It’s a testament to love, not only hers for the game but from the family and friends who held her up through the most difficult two years of her life. Absent any of it, Ducharme’s hellish journey through repeated concussions and their devastating aftermath might never have ended. But with it, through vigilance, patience, and groundbreaking treatment in Florida’s Aviv Clinics, Ducharme rose from the depths of her ordeal, came back from the years she described as “walking around a shell of myself,” and made it back to the bench. Whatever the Huskies accomplish on this winding path toward the NCAA Tournament, know this: Ducharme has already won. She won by being out there at all. And she continues to win by sharing her story in the hope it can help others. *** Caroline Ducharme grew up in an athletic family — mother Chrissy, father Todd, and siblings Ashley and Reid all boast impressive sports résumés. So this is a family that understands injury risk, Caroline most of all, with a torn ACL and a labrum injury robbing her of significant time at Nobles. She became the No. 5-ranked recruit in her national graduating class anyway, a McDonald’s All-American and two-time Gatorade Massachusetts Player of the Year, before cracking UConn’s starting lineup 11 times as a freshman. But then came concussions, and a sobering lesson in the difference between treating injuries to the body and those to the brain. When Ducharme took the first rough blow to the head, hit across the bridge of her nose in a January 2022 game against DePaul, she had no idea of the harrowing road ahead. As she and UConn’s committed training staff tried to navigate her symptoms, allowing time off before returning to play, Ducharme pushed through. But unfortunately, across the next 22 months, she sustained up to eight more hits to the head. A team flight home after the last one, at a November 2023 game at Minnesota, exacerbated her symptoms to their worst ever. Something had to change. She stepped away from the game completely. “I didn’t necessarily realize how bad it could get,” Ducharme said in a recent conversation. “You hear about concussions, people tell you about them, to be careful, concussions are serious, dangerous, but you never think it’s going to be you. “There were times I couldn’t be in the gym in practice to watch, it was too loud. Never mind games. Even watching them at home, I’d end up closing my eyes and listening to it. I couldn’t watch the screens. I was nauseous, I’d lose feeling in my fingers. The lights would be too bright outside. I wore sunglasses a lot. I would have days I’d feel a little better, and I’d have hope, but I was constantly waiting for the other shoe to fall, get hit again, and have an outburst of bad symptoms.” The dread, the fear, the worry … it left no room for joy, for hope, for all the dreams Ducharme had nurtured about for her basketball career, back when she did an entire school project on the UConn women, using their hometowns to teach geography, their statistics to teach math, their accomplishments to teach history. “We’ve always been a big basketball family, but Caroline has that extra notch of intensity that it’s just her life,” said her sister, Ashley, a former player at Brown and former bedroom sharer back in Milton. “So when she had something that stopped her from playing, something that wasn’t black and white, like ‘put your arm in a cast and you’ll be back in eight weeks,’ that uncertainty was really hard for her. To see her not be able to do the thing that she loved was so hard. And that fear was just horrible to witness.” Enter Aviv. *** Aviv Clinics, located in Florida’s The Villages, was built with our aging population and their cognitive health in mind, but at its Hyperbaric Treatment Center, using a combination of high-tech hyperbaric oxygen chambers, specifically designed cognitive exercises, and physical therapy, remarkable inroads with athletes suffering from post-concussion symptoms have been made. The longstanding medical emphasis has been on concussion prevention, and that remains vital, but finding treatment is the future. “We have brain regions that are not functioning, like they’re sleeping,” explained Aviv CEO and chief medical officer Amir Hadanny. “They’re dormant. Our goal is to bring new blood and new oxygen to rejuvenate them, to wake them up and help them get over that pass that they got stuck in. Let’s call it a jump-start. The way we do it, if you think about it like a HIIT [high-intensity interval treatment] internal treatment, fast, really, really fast, then slow. That type of interval is what we’re doing with pressure and oxygen, how we’re jump-starting those neurons, making sure they have the right environment to jump-start them back into action.” There were hurdles. A struggling Ducharme, who was so low, detached, and suffering, that it was difficult to get her invested in a new treatment. Then the cost, which can run from $20,000-$60,000 and is not covered by insurance. But with Todd and Chrissy guiding the way, with UConn and Auriemma joining a Zoom call to support the effort, and with an NIL grant from the ThinkTaylor foundation run by former soccer star Taylor Twellman, whose own career was ended by concussions, the Ducharmes picked up their lives and moved to Florida for three months. “I remember meeting Caroline, and she was distant, like the world is in front of her eyes and she’s not there. Like hollow,” Hadanny said. “She was pretty discouraged that she was never going to come back. That was our starting point.” Even at her worst, Ducharme channeled her best. Treatments were so hard at first, exhausting enough that any test would send her to a darkened bedroom for hours. “I was used to being physically drained, sore, and sweaty,” she said. “For me, my brain would be exhausted. I didn’t want to talk, think about anything. “I don’t know if I didn’t have basketball at the end of the tunnel that I would have pushed as much as I have.” *** She began to rise. About halfway through, a workout in the fresh Florida air, where her sister and father watched her sink 84 of 100 3-pointers, then joke about the ease of being unguarded. A light in her eyes her parents hadn’t seen for months. “I have so much gratitude and respect for the doctors we were seeing, but the traditional methods weren’t doing anything,” Chrissy said. “After two years of her really struggling, the peaks and valleys, it was awful. This is the only thing that worked. We got our daughter back, the funny, silly kid, never mind basketball.” Said Ducharme: “I was getting back to feeling like who I was before.” By February 2025, she was cleared to return to basketball. On Feb. 22, with her parents in the stands for a game at Butler while she sat at the end of the bench, Ducharme locked eyes with Auriemma. Before he could get the words out — “You want to play?” — she was up and running to the scorer’s table. The crowd at Hinkle Fieldhouse gave her a standing ovation. Todd and Chrissy wiped away tears. Ducharme grabbed the game’s final rebound, and kept moving forward. When UConn defeated South Carolina for title No. 12, Ducharme stood amid the confetti and surrendered to the moment. “They allowed the parents on the floor, we went down there,” Todd said. “She does not cry. She’s not emotional. But she came over and just collapsed and just cried. This was what she wanted when she came to UConn.” *** Now Ducharme is back for a final season, carrying herself and her message with equal pride. She earned her undergraduate degree in August. She was recently one of 20 players named to the watch list for the Cheryl Miller Award. She’s no longer just looking to survive on the court, but thrive. “Being able to share my story, be somebody that somebody else can look up to having had the same issues, be a success story that they can know it’s not the end of the road, if you need to take your time, sit out, be honest about your treatment,” she said. “I’m proud of being able to come back from it.”
