Sarah Strong doesn’t care about stardom. A winning focus could make her one of UConn’s best ever
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But it’s not the numbers that keep him out of those waters.
It’s that Auriemma has been fortunate enough to see greatness arrive in many forms and times during his career. And when you’ve been able to witness that, how could you possibly pick just one?
There was Diana Taurasi. She was in your face, telling you exactly how she was going to physically dominate. Sue Bird was more subtle in every way. You wouldn’t even realize she had taken over … until it was done. Maya Moore was a tornado. Auriemma would sit down on the bench after tipoff and she’d already have 15 points, 10 rebounds and four blocks. Breanna Stewart handled an 111-game winning streak with a playground-like ease Auriemma had never seen. Paige Bueckers announced her greatness to anyone within earshot.
And now, there’s Sarah Strong.
“She’s like this mist that’s everywhere,” Auriemma says, his arms fanning out to his sides and his fingers fluttering up and down. “Your eyes just keep following her everywhere she goes, every play she makes. And you don’t say anything and you wonder, how can anything be that easy? How can anything look that easy?”
Last season, as the national freshman of the year, Strong played alongside future 2025 No. 1 pick Bueckers and potential 2026 lottery pick Azzi Fudd, and Strong was arguably the most important part of their national title run. This season, she led UConn to its 11th undefeated regular season and was named The Athletic’s national player of the year as well as the Big East player and defensive player of the year. She ended the regular-season shooting 60 percent from the field, 42.5 percent on 3-pointers and 88.2 percent on free throws) — just shy of a 60-40-90 season, an achievement that has never happened in the NBA, WNBA or college basketball.
And somehow, she might be an even more impactful defender. She’s having the best defensive season since at least 2009, according to defensive rating statistics.
The Huskies, who won the Big East tournament title Monday night, will be a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament — largely due to Strong’s play.
It often takes observers merely one possession of watching Strong to ask Auriemma if she’s the greatest player he has ever coached — or at least the greatest since … fill in the blank. Auriemma bristles at the question because she’s not even halfway through her UConn career, but he also understands why some are inclined to ask.
“She feels basketball like a 10-year veteran pro. She doesn’t feel it like a 19-year-old,” said ESPN analyst Rebecca Lobo, Auriemma’s first All-American at UConn. “It’s like an old-soul, experienced sensibility that she has. I can’t think of a comparison when it comes to that for her, and I’ve been watching this game a really, really long time.
“I can’t think of a comp for her.”
Before Strong had even donned a UConn uniform or won a national title, Auriemma knew she was special. Not that she would be special or could be special. She already was.
He went so far as to put her in a different category entirely: Generational.
He had felt this way about players before. But in this current era, where fame is accessible to an elite group of women’s college basketball players, Strong is different from even the other special players he has coached.
She seemed completely indifferent to many of the modern appeals that often come with being a highly recruited elite player. She isn’t active on social media. She doesn’t have interest in being in front of the camera or giving interviews. Her teammates consider her funny and personable, but she has absolutely no intention of putting her personality on display.
Coaching has always been about more than putting a player in the right spot on the floor, and Auriemma has always thought of his job as trying to get his players to reach their respective potential, which includes (or results from) bypassing the deterrents that came up along the way. Strong’s mindset, at a time when there are more distractions and temptations than ever in college sports, means Auriemma is left playing defense against those obstacles far less.
“There are so many things you don’t know when a kid is coming in — You don’t know what’s in their heads, what their demons are, what outside influences are gonna get in the way. You don’t know these things,” Auriemma said. “She doesn’t have any (of those).”
Said Strong: “I’m not really waking up every day worried about how much money I can make. I’m just worried about how I can be better for my team and make it far in March.”
Moving into the NIL era, branding experts predicted that top female athletes would cash in because of their assumed ease on social media. Some athletes early in this era proved that charisma and candidness coupled with their athletic skills could be highly lucrative. There’s a benefit, many learned, to being a downpour instead of a drizzle.
Angel Reese was an early adopter of NIL opportunities, building a foundation in college, where there’s a broader audience, that became an empire spanning fashion, food, modeling, film and television. Paige Bueckers conducted a whirlwind offseason tour ahead of her senior season, spotted on NFL and WNBA sidelines, fashion weeks and photo shoots. Caitlin Clark wasn’t especially active on social media, but she used her fame to participate in golf tournaments in between commercial shoots for State Farm, Gatorade and Nike.
Those three college superstars carried their teams to national title games and became brands off the court. They average 3.7 million Instagram followers apiece. To brands, that following means a lot (with a dollar sign on the front and usually several zeroes at the end).
Strong’s so humdrum during news conferences, Auriemma calls it her “performance art.” Reporters learned quickly never to ask a question that could be answered with “yes” or “no,” because that was about all they’d get. Even in her extended answers, her quote might stretch to a sentence that involved a comma.
No one goes to UConn imagining hiding in the shadows on one of the most visible teams in college sports, but the lights were never why UConn — or basketball — has been attractive to Strong. As a high school player, she competed on her dad’s AAU team, not the All-Star team or the collection of five-star recruit teams. In high school, she transferred from a school that competed at the second-highest level of North Carolina high school sports to a private school where she graduated with about 40 other students, she estimates.
Nothing about Strong even hints that she’s chasing any level of stardom.
Her management team takes care of her social media posts. She has 119,000 Instagram followers, has averaged a post a month over the last two years and doesn’t even know how to post a photo. Her Twitter/X account has been inactive since high school and she doesn’t know her login info.
TikTok is the app where she says she shares the most, but even there, with an algorithm that incentivizes frequent posting and constant interaction, Strong often goes several months between posts. Much to her teammates’ dismay — and teasing — Strong never even posted about winning the national title on social media, deciding at a point that she had waited too long to do so and by then, it would just be weird.
Said Fudd: “It’s just so Sarah that she doesn’t really care about all that other stuff.”
Strong’s virtual invisibility on social media and indifference with her public persona hasn’t been a turnoff for endorsements, signaling that major brands see an athlete whose play alone speaks volumes. She has signed with Jordan Brand and Madison Reed, and was one of a handful of talented college players to sign an NIL deal with Unrivaled.
“There’s certainly a tradeoff,” said Strong’s mom, Allison Feaster, who played in the WNBA and is an executive with the Boston Celtics. “Young athletes, quite frankly nowadays, are overexposed. We’ve always been of the belief that if it’s yours, it’s going to come. And there’s a way to be strategic and targeted in putting yourself out there.”
But it’s not all strategic, of course.
“It’s just Sarah and what her priorities are,” Feaster said. “She theoretically could be something else, but I think she’s very comfortable being who she is.”
When Auriemma started recruiting Strong, he was struck with the dichotomy of her personality — she seemed so mature and self-possessed on the floor. She met every moment and played well beyond her years. Off it, she seemed very much like a young teenager. She was shy and giggly when she felt uncomfortable.
UConn was her top choice, and Auriemma has more national championships than any women’s basketball coach. But while recruiting Strong, the No. 1 player in the Class of 2024, he could barely get her on the phone. She wouldn’t pick up when he called. When he reached her via her parents, Strong would hardly talk. There was a bit of an irony in this, and, if Auriemma is being honest, it made him like her even more.
“It was refreshing,” he says. “You don’t meet many kids that are that talented, that gifted and who aren’t affected by the things around them.”
Feaster reassured Auriemma that she was the same way when her college coach at Harvard recruited her. She said talking to Feaster was like pulling teeth. By that measure, Auriemma figured, by the end of his recruitment of Strong, he’d have a second career as an oral surgeon.
Even when she got to campus, Auriemma knew that public speaking might be the most challenging aspect of her college basketball career. After her first postgame media experience, Auriemma called her to his office and explained that this — the attention, the cameras, the questions — was going to be a part of her basketball responsibilities moving forward. She didn’t need to love it (he had coached plenty of players who didn’t) but she needed to do it better for her teammates.
When framed like that, she got on board. Strong began taking weekly media training sessions with a team staffer to help her feel less anxious in interviews.
As March Madness approaches, more eyes will be on the Huskies. A season ago, she could hide behind the storylines centered on Bueckers’ quest for a national title, but she’s the headliner now.
With six wins separating the Huskies from a second consecutive national title, a feat that has been accomplished by only three programs in NCAA women’s history (UConn, Tennessee and USC), the attention on Strong will continue to grow.
Her profile will continue to rise as the comparisons become more obvious. Will she win two in a row like Maya? Three in a row like Diana? Four in a row like Stewie?
As Auriemma looks to Strong, he knows that none of that will affect her. Not on the court. Not off it.
She’s special, and her greatness is evident. Will she be the greatest ever? That’s irrelevant to Auriemma. For now, his job is to let the mist settle in and to let Sarah be Sarah. She’ll learn to handle the attention, but if she can have it her way, the acclaim will be centered only on her basketball success.
“What a novel idea that someone is recognized around the country,” Auriemma said, “simply for the thing that she loves the most.”
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Connecticut Huskies, Women's College Basketball
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