AZZI FUDD LOOKS over her cards and refers to my handwritten instructions for a game called Dinger that she has never played before this early October morning. Wearing gray sweatpants with a pink sweatshirt at UConn’s practice facility, she recalls how she spent her childhood summers playing Uno and other card games at her grandparents’ lake house in Minnesota. She tells me how she quickly picked up the game of Spades last summer while she was waiting in an airport lounge in China with Stephen Curry.
Fudd squints at her hand, looks up and then starts laying down cards, one after the other.
The 5-foot-11 guard led UConn to its 12th national championship last season and was named Most Outstanding Player of the Final Four. Since then, she wowed at New York Fashion Week, launched a podcast, took a Caribbean cruise and hobnobbed with Curry on the other side of the globe.
She spent the summer much as she has spent every other summer, working to perfect a game that has peaked mostly in quiet gyms in front of well-trained eyes.
Now, after deciding the WNBA can wait, Fudd is back in Storrs, dropping cards as if they’re burning her fingers. She wants all the minutes she can get during her final season in college after knee and foot injuries cut short her first three years. She wants to help UConn become the first repeat champion since the Huskies won four in a row from 2013 to 2016. «Obviously,» she says. She wants to get more vocal on the court and more versatile with the ball.
Mostly, she wants to show the world the Azzi Fudd that only a select few have seen. «Hearts,» Fudd calls out.
Barely five minutes into our game, she lays down her final card. She smiles.
«Done.»
Kevin Durant, Trae Young and Paige Bueckers, is running her through one of his go-to drills.
Fudd catches the ball in the corner. As soon as the ball hits her hands, she is ready to shoot. After letting it fly, she sprints to the opposite corner for another catch-and-shoot. Then back to the other corner for a dribble pull-up. She crosses the court again for another pull-up. On her third trip to each corner, she plays live one-on-one against a defender. Then she repeats the drill around the arc. She gets three points for each 3-pointer made, two points for the pull-ups and one for scoring on the defender. Forty-two is the highest possible score. Brickley requires the NBA players he trains to score 28 points before they can move on to a different drill.
«It’s six, seven minutes of straight running, shooting, live basketball,» Brickley says. «Super hard drill.»
This is Fudd’s third consecutive day with Brickley. They’ve been doing two sessions per day, and Brickley expects Fudd to start to feel the effects of the workouts. Her first time through the drill, she scores 27. Brickley runs her through it again. This time her score is a 26. Fudd does it again. She scores 27 again. On the sixth time, she breaks through for a 36.
«Any player that I’ve ever worked with at that point would be like, ‘All right, today I couldn’t get it,'» Brickley says. «That takes some mental toughness and ridiculous mindset to even push yourself through that much to get that number.»
This version of Azzi Fudd is legendary in Brickley’s gym and in the gym of Brandon Payne, who trains Curry and began working with Fudd after she and Cameron Brink became the first two girls to attend the SC30 Select Camp in 2018.
Fudd stood out to Payne immediately. The staff was setting up a scrimmage, and Fudd and Brink were given the option to compete against the boys. Among them were future NBA players Anthony Edwards, Jalen Suggs, Jalen Green and Cole Anthony.
Caitlin Clark and Bueckers were locks at the No. 1 pick in the past two drafts, but 2026 seems much murkier. Fudd could be a lottery pick, but she could just as easily slide. ESPN’s most recent mock draft projects Fudd to the Seattle Storm with the No. 3 pick as the second guard off the board, behind TCU’s Olivia Miles. But the lottery cannot be held, nor can free agency happen, until the CBA gets worked out.
As she considers the ways her life will change with the WNBA’s summer schedule, she smiles and recalls her days as a kid, when she spent parts of her summer in Minnesota visiting her grandparents. Camp Fudd was all about family, card games, the lake, tubing and time together.
«I’m going to miss having August in Minnesota,» Fudd says. «But I’m still going to try to figure it out, where I can at least make it to the cabin once because that is one of my favorite places, ever.»
Minnesota holds Chicago’s lottery pick, which I point out. Fudd does not take the bait.
«Is that a jack?» she asks, pointing to the card on the table.
Sarah Strong as the forward dribbles toward the top of the key during UConn’s exhibition game against Southern Connecticut State. It’s UConn’s first possession, and Fudd accepts a handoff from Strong. She immediately squares her body to the hoop and lets the shot fly from NBA range. She misses, but taking the shot signals her aggression.
Her next opportunity comes two game minutes later. The game is tied 2-2. Fudd passes the ball to Strong at the elbow. Fudd runs to the wing to receive another handoff from Strong. Seeing her defender go under Strong rather than over the top, Fudd stays behind the 3-point line. As soon as the ball touches Fudd’s hands, she explodes upward into a jump shot, holding her follow-through as the ball splashes through the net.
«She’s like that duck swimming across the water,» Katie says. «It looks nice and smooth, but underneath the legs are going, but you don’t see it.»
Her teammates noticed her newfound willingness to hunt her shot and take it with even a glimmer of space as soon as they returned to campus for fall pickup against practice players.
«She just came out looking very assertive and not really hesitant,» says Strong, the 2025-26 Big East preseason player of the year. «She knew where she wanted the ball and how she wanted to score it.»
Strong also was surprised by what she was hearing.
«Just seeing her talking more was really, really shocking,» Strong says.
That’s not a role Fudd ever needed to fill as a Husky. Before, she could keep her head down and lead by example. No one was expecting to hear from her when Bueckers and Nika Muhl were around.
But after practice one day, Fudd went to Strong’s room. Auriemma had been harping on leadership in practice, and both of them knew they needed to step up, even though it didn’t come naturally to either of them.
«We both agreed that people are probably going to look up to us,» Strong says. «And how we probably need to do a better job leading on the court and just getting the reps at it in practice so we can do it naturally in the games.»
When the Huskies, who open the season Tuesday against Louisville (ESPN, 5:30 p.m. ET) as the preseason No. 1, need a basket, Fudd will be called upon to take the ball and make the right read. She didn’t turn into a point guard over the summer, but in critical moments, Fudd is likely to have the ball in her hands significantly more, a responsibility that had fallen on Bueckers’ shoulders.
«I’ve been saying this about our guards in general, and now Azzi in particular,» Auriemma says. «I think they were bailed out a lot during their careers here. If they did it that night, great. If they didn’t, that’s OK. We would still have plenty to win with. These guys have benefited from all those other guys that have been around, and now it’ll be a real growing thing for Azzi to take on that role that those other guys had.»
FUDD SMIRKS AS she lays down her second-to-last card.
«One card,» she declares.
Fudd might be on the precipice of beating me at my family card game, but I can still make it difficult. I change the suit.
«You never have hearts,» I tell her.
Fudd rolls her eyes and draws. She changes the suit to spades. After picking up a few cards, I get it to diamonds. Fudd doesn’t have any of those either. Now, she’s really picking up cards.
«There’s no way,» she says as she continues to draw. «You’re cheating.»
This is the rubber match to decide the overall Dinger winner. It has been a marathon, with Fudd declaring at one point that she was «so sick of this game.» Really, she was annoyed she hadn’t won yet.
Fudd needs to be somewhere in a few minutes. She is determined to finish. «Go fast,» she tells me.
Our banter stops. The clock ticks as we lay down our cards. Diamonds. Hearts. A queen. Draw two. Spades. Clubs. A wild-card jack. The clock runs out with both of us still holding cards.
«That was fun,» I say as I stuff the cards back into the box and Fudd gets up to leave.
«It would have been more fun,» Fudd answers, flashing a wide smile, «if I beat you.»
Wardrobe styling by Sydnee Paige; Hair styling by Hayley Logan; Makeup styling by Claire Malley. Look 1: Top by Ksubi, pants by Maniere de voir, shoes by Aldo, ear cuff by BaubleBar. Look 2: Jacket and short set by yllw label, earrings by gorjana, ear cuff by BaubleBar.
