STORRS — The first time Geno Auriemma met Sue Bird In his office on campus, what he remembers most is how nervous the star point guard was.
UConn women’s basketballas Auriemma said, “wasn’t what UConn is today” in the late 1990s, when Bird was becoming a high school superstar. The Huskies only had the 1995 national championship under their belt, so Auriemma said the coaching staff felt the pressure to draft a player of Bird’s caliber. But for all his talent on the field, Bird was visibly uncomfortable being the center of attention during the recruiting process.
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“We’re more like the coaches, we really want to have her, and in the meantime, she’s incredibly nervous and nervous about being in that environment and making a big deal like that,” Auriemma said Saturday. “Even today, I tell him, ‘You were just overwhelmed because you wanted to come to Connecticut so much that you were nervous about it.’
Bird, now a Huskies legend, has been forced to familiarize himself with the spotlight over the past two decades, perhaps never more so than in the past year. She retired from the WNBA after 20 seasons with the Seattle Storm in 2022 and spent 2025 receiving the flowers she rarely received when she was an active player. The storm unveiled a Bird statue in August in front of Climate Pledge Arena, making her the first player to have a statue in a WNBA arena. She was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in June and then into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in September. His scouting tour will finally end Sunday in Storrs when his No. 10 jersey will be retired at Gampel Pavilion before the Huskies’ game against DePaul.
“It should be a really fun day,” Auriemma said. “I talked to the players about it, how it’s not often you get to be a part of something like this. I know I’m excited about it, and I hope they are too.”
At UConn, Bird helped the Huskies win NCAA championships in 2000 and 2002 and four Big East tournament titles. She is a three-time winner of the Nancy Lieberman Award for the nation’s top point guard, and she was the unanimous national player of the year as a senior in 2002. Bird still holds the UConn career records for 3-point field goal percentage (45.9) and free throw percentage (89.2), and she ranks seventh all-time in career assists (585).
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Bird was UConn’s first-ever No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft and had one of the most prolific careers in league history. She retired as the WNBA’s all-time leader with 3,234 assists, and she earned a WNBA record 13 All-Star selections. She led the Storm to four WNBA championships (2004, ’10, ’18, 20), tied for the second-most titles won by a single player. Bird also helped lead Team USA to five consecutive Olympic gold medals and four FIBA World Championships.
The UConn women’s basketball program is only retiring the jerseys of Naismith Hall of Fame players. Bird therefore joins an ultra-exclusive club which currently only has two members. The Huskies retired Rebecca Lobo’s number 50 in 2019 and Swin Cash’s number 32 in 2022, and Maya Moore will also have her number 23 retired in the near future after being inducted into the Hall of Fame alongside Bird this year. Bird’s jersey retirement ceremony will begin approximately 30 minutes before tipoff Sunday and will be available to stream on the team’s Facebook and X pages as well as the UConn Huskies YouTube channel.
“It’s probably not fair that that’s the criteria. It’s a bit of a ridiculous criteria, but I think it also represents how, among a list of incredible people, some were truly unique,” Auriemma said. “The common thread if you look at Rebecca and Swin and Sue, and then Maya, is obviously the basketball talent…the impact they had on their teams while they were here, singularly, and how synonymous they became with their team. And what’s amazing about those three and Maya is the incredible success they had after they left here.”
In addition to Bird’s return, the Huskies welcomed another pair of iconic alumni to campus this week, Paige Bueckers and Aaliyah Edwards. Bueckers, fresh off her Rookie of the Year season with the Dallas Wings, and Edwards, who finished her second WNBA season with the Connecticut Sun, had not been in the UConn gym together since they were teammates in 2023-24, and junior guard Ashlynn Shade said it was surreal to watch the duo compete against the Huskies’ men’s practice players.
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“I’m like, I haven’t played with you since my freshman year. It’s kind of crazy, and now I’m a junior, so it’s like wow, this is really weird,” Shade laughed. “But I think it’s so fun to have them back. It makes practice a little lighter when you have Paige and Aaliyah on the practice squad and it’s not just the guys every day.”
Shade said the team didn’t get any trash talk from Edwards in practice, but Bueckers doled it out to everyone, including — and even especially — her teammates on the practice squad. Auriemma joked that Bueckers’ return was like “having Dennis the Menace back on campus,” but the UConn coach said he liked the dynamic of having former players back in the building around the current team.
“It’s just a different vibe when they’re here,” Auriemma said with a smile. “It’s great to look back on a lot of things. It’s great to see that they haven’t changed much, and yet it’s great to see how different they are in the short time they’ve been away.”
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How to watch UConn vs. DePaul women’s basketball
Site: Gampel Pavilion, Storrs
Time/date: 1:00 p.m., Sunday
Team records: UConn 8-0, DePaul 2-7
Series record: UConn leads 26-1
Last meeting: 84-58 UConn, Jan. 29 at Chicago
Television: FS1
Streaming: FOX Sports app
Radio: UConn Sports Network on FOX Sports 97.9
