As far as basketball parents go, Tim and Katie Fudd have played, watched and analyzed as much as any others, going back to when they first bonded over the space between rim and three-point line, Katie shooting jumpers, Tim her moony rebounder. Asked, then, when they knew in April — knew their daughter was about to take over the Final Four, leaving everyone and everything in her path of full destruction — Mom and Dad had the same answer.
It wasn’t how she looked in warmups.
It wasn’t the way she left the huddle, the way she walked between plays, the way she kept her shoulders back.
Nope. Without hesitation, it was none of those things.
It was the look on Azzi Fudd’s face.
That look said everything and then some.
Tim first noticed the difference when Azzi was little, still learning the game and how to put her spin on it. This was before she played against the boys in middle school, starred at St. John’s College High in D.C., became the top player in her class, then a Connecticut recruit, then an early face of a new era in college sports, rising straight up, something like a rocket, until she was almost a cautionary tale, stuck in an endless loop of injury rehabs, then back again, dominating that Final Four, winning the national title and being named most outstanding player, all before returning for one last run with the top-ranked Huskies this season.
Way before any of that, there were peewee practices at Archbishop Carroll High, where Tim coached the boys’ varsity team. And there was a pair of little eyebrows, moving like caterpillars, serving as a weather vane.
“When those eyebrows start pointing toward the sky, to the top of your forehead, you’re searching for something,” Tim recalled telling his daughter. “You’re looking for the first exit out. You want someone else to have the answer.”
But when they went the other way, when Azzi furrowed them into a V?
“Then she’s hunting for answers,” Tim said. “And she’s going to figure them out.”
IT WAS THE FALL of 2020, the world still peeking out from hiding, and the Fudds were 20 minutes from Storrs, Connecticut, cruising on the highway. Azzi, then a high school senior, was tired of being at home, isolated from the squeak of other players’ shoes. She wanted to be around friends, some of whom already played for the Huskies, so the family packed into the car and headed north. And now Azzi had an announcement.
She had made up her mind about college. Connecticut it was. Even though they expected it, Tim and Katie jumped a bit in their seats. It was, unofficially, the most anyone had cheered at that specific stretch of Interstate 91.
Azzi, though, was crying. The celebration stopped. Her parents asked what was wrong.
“But do you guys think I’m good enough?” she said. Over the previous few years, she had been named Gatorade national player of the year as a sophomore. She had successfully returned from two torn ligaments in her right knee. At 5-foot-11, she was considered one of the best pure shooters in the country, if not the best. She was headed to U-Conn., the epicenter of women’s hoops, yet here she was, caught in the moment, doubting herself?
Tim had never heard anything like it. He wondered aloud whether Azzi remembered who she was.
Less than a year later, Azzi was in Los Angeles, on set to shoot a TikTok commercial with Tyronn Lue and Allen Iverson. In July 2021, the NCAA began permitting athletes to earn money off their names, images and likenesses (NIL). Azzi started at U-Conn. the next month. That meant, as soon as she enrolled in college, she could sign endorsement deals, which flowed in right away.
“She was almost like one of the first NIL grown-ups,” said Nick Blatchford, one of her agents with UNLTD Sports. So in Los Angeles, she had her own trailer. She had a stunt double, too, to stand in for shots while Azzi was in hair and makeup. Never in her life, in her most practical dreams, could she have imagined how long it took for hair and makeup. And while sitting in that chair, while saying her lines, while chatting with Iverson — a freaking Hall of Famer — between takes, Azzi couldn’t quiet the loudest questions in her head.
What am I doing here?
What is going on?
AZZI’S “WELCOME TO COLLEGE BASKETBALL” MOMENT: During one of her first practices as a freshman, senior Christyn Williams drove straight at her and lowered her shoulder. Azzi went flying. As she peeled herself off the court, she remembers thinking her teammates were even stronger than she expected. She was also thinking: That hurt.
But the real struggle was getting her footing at the next level. The business side was never a problem. Early in that freshman season, she signed a wide-ranging NIL deal with Stephen Curry. The NBA star took to Azzi when she attended one of his camps as a high-schooler. In the announcement for their partnership, he called her the “next face of women’s basketball.”
There was more where that came from. But it was hard to find a basketball rhythm when she couldn’t stay on the court. As a freshman, she missed 11 games with a foot injury. As a sophomore, she missed 22 with knee issues. At one point, when she was offered an endorsement deal while she was rehabbing, she said she didn’t want to do it. Tim’s first instinct was to push back. In a dad kind of way, he did the math in his head, then asked Azzi whether she knew how many hours he would have to work to make the same kind of money.
But it wasn’t about the money or the strain on her time. In the NIL era, the size of a player’s social media following — especially for female athletes — often dictates the value of deals. There is, in turn, a constant pressure to post, sometimes to offer bits of yourself with a teaspoon, other times with a shovel. And with this offer, Azzi told Tim she wasn’t comfortable appearing in a social media campaign when she wasn’t playing.
“You’re promoting yourself, you are promoting your product, you’re growing your brand. Now there’s this expectation,” said Geno Auriemma, the legendary U-Conn. coach. “Now I’m going to go prove it because they’re really betting on my future. Not what I’ve done, right? Okay. So now I have this obligation to my teammates, this obligation to the coaches, this obligation to my sponsors, for lack of a better word, and to myself. I got all this stuff riding on it. And, uh, I’m in a thing here with Steph Curry, who has won four titles, by the way, and has done all those things that I want to do.
“And now I’m being compared to him, but now I’m going to go prove it. And then all of a sudden, two years go by and you haven’t proved a thing, right? Because you haven’t had the opportunity to. But yet, Tuesday, you still have to do a shoot. Wednesday, you’ll have to do this or that. It’s got to work on your mind a little bit — like, I’m not doing any of the things that people are praising me for. So I can imagine the young athlete, not just Azzi, walking around with, like, this impostor syndrome almost.”
The next chance to shake any of that was her junior year, the 2023-24 season. And then Azzi tore her ACL again, the same knee as in high school.
Curry called Carl Bergstrom, who then called an ACL specialist, a physiotherapist, a performance therapist and an expert in physiology and nutrition. Their mission, as Bergstrom put it, was not just to get Azzi back to playing but to “turn her into Superwoman.”
First, they met over Zoom, mapping out a rehab plan that would unfold in Storrs, the D.C. area and Canada, where Azzi made a handful of trips to Bergstrom’s home facility. Bergstrom, the director of performance at Thirty Ink, Curry’s multifaceted company, quarterbacked the whole process. And once it got going, his team measured Azzi’s progress by measuring … well, everything, including how she walked.
The injury had naturally created an imbalance with her steps. That made Bergstrom particularly interested in how long each foot was on the ground while Azzi was walking, then how much force she was using with her right and left foot to push off. If, after a certain workout, the asymmetry increased, they would pull back a bit. But when it kept decreasing, little by little, they knew they were on the right track.
At times, especially early on, Azzi wondered whether she would be able to shoot the same, contribute the same, be the same player who once stood atop the women’s basketball world, all-everything, all the time. To deal with that sort of self-talk, she met regularly with a mental performance coach. But she also just sank into the work.
Eventually, she started dribbling while sitting down, then took form shots, arms only, before moving to set jumpers around the court. And that last part — unable to move beyond a spot, not even to jog around a make-believe screen — was tedious yet familiar. Because way more often than not, the ball ripped through the net.
BEFORE THE NCAA TOURNAMENT this past spring, Azzi walked into Auriemma’s office with one massive question for them to discuss: Stay or go?
For the past four years, since the beginning of Azzi’s college career, every top athlete has had to make the choice. NIL money has warped the equation. Additional years of eligibility, because of the pandemic or injuries, have complicated it. But no matter what Azzi did, Auriemma wanted her to decide before March Madness began, feeling it was better to get ahead of speculation.
So they talked. And Auriemma was honest. And around the room, wherever Azzi looked, there were reminders of why, of all the people in the world, there may be no one better at advising star college basketball players.
A framed jersey for his 1,000th career win.
A row of national championship trophies.
A 71-year-old coach, right there in his chair, who had mentored so many of Azzi’s heroes.
“‘I’ll support you no matter what, whatever you decide, but your time here at U-Conn., you have not reached your full potential,’” Azzi recalled Auriemma telling her. “‘And you would kind of be doing yourself a disservice by going to the WNBA. Teams wouldn’t really know who they’re drafting because … I’d say you’ve only played five games where you are playing peak Azzi Fudd basketball.’”
He didn’t mean last season, either, but in her whole college career.
He’s right, Azzi recalled thinking. I’ve been here four years, and that number is way too low.
THOSE EYEBROWS MADE a V. The ball kept going in. If a defender closed out hard, hoping to take away Azzi’s jumper, she blew straight past her. Instead of overthinking, instead of calculating whether each dribble, pass or shot was right or wrong, she just played. She was free.
Peak Azzi Fudd basketball. Exactly what Auriemma wanted.
In a national semifinal against UCLA, Azzi scored 19 points. Then in the title game, South Carolina couldn’t stop her. Up in the stands at Amalie Arena in Tampa, her parents, brothers and grandparents leaped up and down. So did Jonathan Scribner, her high school coach, while realizing he had felt this way before. He once watched Azzi drop 35 points in a boys’ middle school game. At an AAU tournament in eighth grade, she was so dominant, with so much poise and skill, that all these college coaches could only shake their heads.
This was what they had expected for her, of her, detours not included. When the final buzzer sounded, Azzi had 24 points, five rebounds and confetti on her head. Tim and Katie made their way to the court, though Katie got stuck behind a rope and an overzealous security guard. Tim, however, was approached by one reporter, then another, then another after that. To each of them, he repeated himself. He had one thing to say.
“None of you know, and I’ll be clear about it,” he remembered telling them. “That is Azzi Fudd.”
THERE WAS NO ONE at the gym’s front desk, so Katie first put some cash in an envelope and left it on the counter. But when Azzi wanted around-the-clock access, Katie sprung for a monthly pass, all the way in Hinckley, Minnesota, so they could come and go with a key fob.
These were the quiet moments of an otherwise insane summer. In the mornings, Azzi and her friends went through intense workouts, firing hundreds of jumpers. Her brothers rebounded. Katie watched her footwork like a hawk. And in the afternoons, they rested and laughed at a lake house owned by Azzi’s grandparents. She read novels in the hammock. She kept calling it her “last summer before I start working.”
Otherwise, though, Azzi was on the move, almost from the moment that confetti fell in Tampa.
“I remember just coming out of all that and all of us getting together after the celebrations and just starting to look at, like, ‘Good Morning America’ and everything that started to come,” said Blatchford, one of her agents. “And just communicating to the family and to Azzi: ‘We’re going to a different place now.’”
They were more selective, sure, but that didn’t make Azzi any less busy. She hosted her own party at WNBA All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis. She accompanied Curry on a promotional tour in China. She launched her podcast, “Fudd Around and Find Out,” then attended New York Fashion Week, posting some of her many looks on Instagram. And when she went to Times Square, she looked up and saw herself on a billboard for Paula’s Choice skin care.
I love it, she recalled thinking, but like: Why? Is this really real? Are we really in Times Square right now?
That’s not actually me up there.
Is it?
Traveling with Azzi to China, Katie went through some of the same questions. People didn’t just know Azzi, but they also brought her gifts, asked to take selfies, held out items for her to sign. Here, on the other side of the planet, was her daughter, surrounded by adoring fans. And in real time, Katie could see Azzi’s idea of herself catch up with how the world views her.
“It’s still surreal for me to be in that situation, too,” Katie said. “Like, that’s my baby.”
At one point, seeing posts from the trip, a friend texted Katie: She’s at that level. That’s who she is.
Katie sent back a photo of Azzi as a little girl, hair frizzy, arms and legs stuffed into a St. Patrick’s Day outfit.
“This is what I see when I see her,” she said. “Just my little baby.”
EIGHT FALLS AGO, a Washington Post reporter knocked on a door in Northern Virginia, ready to meet a 15-year-old who had yet to play a high school game. For months, coaches all over the area told the reporter he had to write about Azzi Fudd. There were good players, there were great players, and then there were players like her, they said, something else entirely. One coach said she should keep playing with the boys. Another predicted she would be the first one-and-done in women’s basketball history, if that were allowed by the time she got to college.
None of them talked about ACL tears, about the weight of expectations, about what happens when a seed of self-doubt grows into a hulking tree.
“I like scoring,” Azzi said that afternoon, sitting across from the reporter on the Fudds’ living room couch. “I also like playing the point guard now. I probably like being a guard better. I don’t know. I like them all. I just like being on the court.”
Then on a Zoom call last month, the same reporter asked Fudd, now 23, what she would tell that teenage girl. She took a second. She squinted. Soon she would open the Huskies’ season with 20 points against No. 20 Louisville, finishing with 20 shot attempts. She will always be a people pleaser, but she’s learning to attack more, to think less, to make Peak Azzi Fudd her permanent mode again. She scored 31, canning seven threes, in a win over No. 6 Michigan on Friday night. She’s trying to take more risks.
But at the moment, she just sat there and thought, searching for how she would prepare her past self for eight crazy years.
“Hm.”
“Um.”
Twenty seconds passed.
“I would tell her to always believe in herself. That I always belong.”
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