Paige Bueckers will revel in return home to Minnesota with UConn women
MINNEAPOLIS — Channeling the little kid in her, the one who used to watch the older women play and aspire to be like them, Paige Bueckers will return to the place where her dreams were hatched.
“It’s super surreal because I grew up going to games at The Barn and watching the Gophers and watching the Lynx play there,” Bueckers said. “So to be playing there, where I grew up, my childhood, at my dream school wearing a UConn jersey in that arena, it’s like a surreal feeling for me.”
This is a program tradition at UConn, a promise to top recruits to reward them with a “homecoming” game before their careers end. Coach Geno Auriemma made sure the Huskies stopped in Croatia during their European tour for Nika Muhl, and has scheduled a rare midseason exhibition game in Toronto in December so that Aaliyah Edwards can play in her native land.
Home for Bueckers is the Land of 10,000 Lakes, and now that she has recovered from the knee surgery that wiped out last season for her, ramped up her minutes per game, she is playing like an All-American just in time for her homecoming. She put her team on her back Thursday night to take over against Maryland.
Now Bueckers, who spoke with reporters when the team arrived at its Minneapolis hotel, will lead the Huskies on what figures to be a satisfying, sentimental and emotional journey, playing against her former high school teammate and “little sister,” Amaya Battle and the University of Minnesota on Sunday at 5 p.m. at Williams Arena, the 95-year building affectionately known to upper Midwest sports fans as “The Barn.” It holds about 15,000 and is expected to be close, of not completely sold out for this game.
“I envisioned it when I was younger,” Bueckers said. “Just wanting to be the people who were playing on the court. As a young kid, that was where I wanted to be. You never knew what the future was going to hold, but it was something I aspired to do.”
Bueckers was maybe 10 or 12 when she began going to games in The Barn. Her idols? It’s a long list.
“Rebekkah (Brunson), Lindsay Whalen, of course, Rachel Banham, Maya Moore,” Bueckers said. “Everybody on the Lynx.”
And she was there for a dramatic shot by the Sparks’ Chelsea Gray hit a dramatic, game-winning shot against the home team in the 2017 WNBA Finals.
“That was an iconic memory for me,” Bueckers said. “And I became a Chelsea Gray fan after that. Everybody I watched, I kind of wanted to be.”
Bueckers, 22, grew up just outside the Twin Cities, in St. Louis Park, Minn., and first rose to fame, on the court and various social media platforms, while playing for Hopkins High in Minnetonka —.playing with 10th graders on the junior varsity team while she was still in seventh grade. She scored 28 points as a freshman in her first high school game, and things skyrocketed from there.
Bueckers was the consensus national player of the year as a freshman at UConn, and though her sophomore season was truncated by injury, she returned in time to help the Huskies reach the Final Four — played in Minneapolis, but not at The Barn, at the Target Center. “This will have a homecoming feel,” she said.
As she returns for this regular season game, there will be less time for going back home and visiting old haunts. Her mother and father relocated after Bueckers graduated from Hopkins High, so she doesn’t have a home in the Minneapolis area, but estimates she will have about 100 friends and relatives at the game..
Among Bueckers’ oldest and closest friends here is Battle, her teammate at Hopkins’ 2019 state championship team, who plays as a sophomore for the Gophers (3-0), scoring a career-high 20 points in a win over North Dakota State this week. Battle has had five or more assists in each of Minnesota’s last four games, dating back to last season. Battle and Bueckers were opposing coaches in a game at the Twin Cities Pro Am last summer.
“It’s kind of crazy to be on the opposite side of Amaya,” Bueckers said. “Everybody knows I’m a competitor, so no friends, no relationships. We’re enemies for a couple of hours. … But me and Amaya’s relationship is so much bigger than what it was on the court. It made what we did on the court easier. She was like a little sister to me, I took her under my wing and we became super close. I would always be at her house. Her parents were like my parents, my parents were like her parents. The tradition was, I would always go to her house before games and her mom would cook us great pregame meals.”
Battle’s mother, Stephanie, a Minnesota alum, died in October 2021, and Bueckers made it back to Minnesota for her service. Battle honored her mother’s wish and signed her letter of intent with the school a couple of weeks later. When Bueckers learned UConn had scheduled this game, Battle was the first call she made.
For the most part, Bueckers considers this a “business trip,” as it is for the Huskies, who are 2-1 with wins over Dayton and Maryland and a loss in between to North Carolina State that showed some vulnerability to big, physical teams. The Huskies mixed it up against Maryland, and in the second quarter Bueckers was poked in the eye and hit the floor hard. She got up and, with three freshmen in the lineup around her, led the Huskies on a 20-2 run to break the game open. She finished with 24 points and six steals, and a red mark below her right eye.
“Paige is an interesting kid, she attracts hits,” coach Geno Auriemma said. “She gets hit a lot. but it has never bothered her, never slowed her down, never made her change. She wants to play so bad, whenever there’s an incident like that she comes back even more determined. She doesn’t want to go to the bench, doesn’t want to feel sorry for herself. She’s a unique kid, like that.”
That is part of what Bueckers hopes the 10- or 12-year-old Minnesota kids who come to The Barn, especially the ones coming specifically to see her, take away from watching her play in The Barn, watching her potentially at her best a year after her devastating injury, the torn left ACL.
“I want to be an inspiration to kids,” Bueckers said. “I know for a lot of young girls, ACLs have become more common, especially in basketball. Just to overcome them. I want people to see that injuries happen, adversity happens, but what do you do to come back from it? How hard to you attack that process? I want people to see passion when they see me play, fire and energy and that I love the game.”
