TAMPA, Fla. — Sarah Strong is so over it. She floats above the Final Four action with just the smallest hint of facial expression, a wry quarter-smile like she’s trying to hold in a laugh. And when the freshman big drives past a defender for an easy scoop layup or slips in the perfect spot for a rebound, it really can feel like that’s what’s happening: Sarah Strong is in on this joke and you’re not.
To retake their place at the top of women’s basketball in Sunday afternoon’s national championship game against South Carolina, the UConn Huskies are turning to a young star but an old soul. UConn’s 85-51 rout of No. 1 overall seed UCLA on Friday night was the team at its best and deadliest. Azzi Fudd found her shooting form after a rough offensive first half in the Elite Eight. Paige Bueckers got to her midrange spots. Jana El Alfy, a redshirt freshman center, poked entry passes away from Lauren Betts. Geno Auriemma has called this a less balanced team than he’s used to coaching. “We rely so much on our perimeter game, and not as much on our interior game,” he said. Lucky for him, though, he has the piece to make it work.
The scariest moments of a UConn game might come when El Alfy is on the bench and Strong spends time at the five in a small-ball lineup, drawing opposing bigs out of the paint and opening up fun possibilities, like a pick-and-pop with Bueckers. (Strong is a 38 percent three-point shooter on real volume.) South Carolina’s Sania Feagin told me this versatility unlocks the entire UConn offense. She’ll share the task of guarding Strong with freshman Joyce Edwards and also-versatile big Chloe Kitts.
To them, Strong is no secret. Edwards has played against Strong since the two were in middle school. Last year, they were co-MVPs of the McDonald's All-American Game. Kitts recalled first playing against Strong at USA Basketball U18 3x3 trials in 2022. It was a setting that flattered Strong. Where she wins one-on-ones with her footwork and frame, she handles doubles with quick thinking. Every part of her game melds craft and power. She's been one of the most efficient finishers in the country this year. On defense, she protects the rim well and fights hard for rebounds while still averaging under two fouls a game. At 6-foot-2, Strong is the sort of rebounder who depends more on positioning, motor, and reads than on sheer athleticism. El Alfy used the word “aggressive” to describe Strong’s work on the glass. The two of them helped outrebound the Gamecocks to the tune of 48-29 when these teams played each other in Columbia in February and UConn won, 87-58. It’s a point of emphasis again for both teams on Sunday, and a wound South Carolina would like to heal in the rematch. Kitts said she was so disappointed with herself that she apologized to her teammates after the game.
The poker face Strong reserves for coaches and media can be hard to square with the image her teammates draw, of a goofball at home beside the extroverted Bueckers and Fudd. But it could just be the selective guardedness of someone who moved around a lot growing up. “By the time she was 10, she’d been to school in Italy, she’d been to school in Zaragoza, Salamanca, Girona, learning Catalan,” Strong’s mother, Allison Feaster, told ESPN’s Holly Rowe on Friday night.
Feaster played 10 years in the WNBA and works in the Celtics front office now. (If her daughter’s emergence at UConn feels like the Empire striking back, Feaster is a monument to underdog pluck: She led 16-seed Harvard to an historic upset of 1-seed Stanford in the 1998 NCAA tournament.) Both Feaster and Strong’s father, Danny, played professionally in Europe, where their daughter was born and spent the early part of her childhood. As a kid, Strong watched NBA and WNBA film with her father. She told me Luka Doncic came up often in those sessions. “He plays with amazing pace and gets the shot that he wants all the time,” she said. It was a strange name to hear from someone who said she’d outgrown trash talk this year. It was stranger evidence of her real age. But it was also a fitting shorthand for what Strong does so well, solving all manner of problems with physicality and patient feel.
Raven Johnson is a fast-talking veteran of two Final Fours and drew the Caitlin Clark assignment the last time around. On Saturday morning, the South Carolina junior was breezing through gameplans for the Huskies. With Fudd, you have to force her off the three-point line. To guard Bueckers, you have to really be in her face. “If you’re guarding Sarah Strong,” she stopped and retreated. “I mean she does it all, too, so, just be alert.”
Strong speaks in clipped, functional sentences. When she shared the postgame podium with Bueckers and Fudd on Friday night, her answer to a few questions was simply “What they both said.” The sentences she inspires, by contrast, can be incomplete and abstract. They’re the awed, frightened ramblings of people who know they’re about to say something impulsive. “Sarah is…” Dawn Staley began, pausing to make stressed noises. Pshh, phehh, hmm. You could hear reason battling with impulse. “She might be—in the next three years, she might be the best player to come out of UConn.” Impulse takes round one.
But then even reason led her in the same direction. Sure, it was a hot take, Staley said, one that Maya Moore or Breanna Stewart might swat into the stands. (They’re the only other UConn freshmen to score 20-plus points in a Final Four game.) “I know Stewie won four. But what she’s able to do…the IQ is off the charts, the skill set off the charts. Big play after big play after big play,” Staley said. “She’s the piece that puts it all together. She makes it all work.”
For Staley, Strong is something of The One Who Got Away. Staley and Feaster were teammates on the Charlotte Sting for five seasons, but she thinks her staff came late to the recruitment. Strong committed to UConn right after their Final Four loss to Iowa, one year ago to the day. “And I haven’t talked to Allison since,” Staley said in February, adding many times that she was just kidding.
In the Final Four, even UCLA's upperclassmen seemed overwhelmed by the moment, turning the ball over 19 times. Strong’s team-high 22 points and eight rebounds for UConn looked especially impressive by comparison. I asked Fudd what it’s like to be a true freshman in the national championship game. “I handled it quite poorly,” she said, wincing at the memory of the blowout 2022 loss to South Carolina. She spent the night before that game vomiting. Bad nerves and bad Brussels sprouts limited her to just 16 minutes in which she recorded a single field goal, a three-pointer late in the fourth quarter when the game was already out of hand. “But Sarah doesn’t play like a freshman. She hasn’t all year.” She might be three years Strong’s senior, but when Fudd smiled and added, “I look up to her,” it made perfect sense.
