SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The UConn women’s basketball team suffered its third consecutive loss to longtime rival Notre Dame 79-68 at Purcell Pavilion on Thursday night, marking the first time the Huskies have dropped three straight to the Fighting Irish in over a decade.
Notre Dame sophomore Hannah Hidalgo had an elite performance against UConn for the second season in a row, finishing with a team-high 29 points plus 10 rebounds, eight assists and three steals. Hidalgo shot 6-for-11 from 3-point range and was perfect at the free throw line on seven attempts. The All-American guard also had a double-double with 34 points in the Irish’s 2023-24 win over the Huskies in Storrs.
“Her talent is obvious. Even if you’re not a basketball person you can tell that the talent level that she has is pretty unique,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. “But I think more important is the way she attacks everything she does. The way she attacks your defense and then when she’s on defense she attacks your offense, the way that she leads her team in so many different ways, I think you put all of those three things together, and it’s just a really, really, really difficult matchup.”
Huskies superstar Paige Bueckers gave UConn a chance with 25 points, shooting 11-for-20 from the field, also adding three rebounds, two assists and two steals. Freshman Sarah Strong led the team on the boards with seven and added 14 points, making two of UConn’s three made 3-pointers in the entire game. The Huskies were ultimately doomed by an abysmal shooting performance from beyond the arc. Bueckers went 0-for-4 and the team finished hitting just 18.8% to Notre Dame’s 10-for-18.
“They were just denying a lot, switching a lot, just making it hard and not getting many open looks,” Bueckers said. “We’ll obviously learn from it and grow from it … and use this as a way to build and get better. We’ll take the loss as a lesson, but also use it as fuel. They beat us, and they deserved to win. They played harder than us and they wanted more, which is what we can’t have.”
UConn looked immediately out of sorts in the first half despite a close opening quarter, struggling to find the usual offensive rhythm and ball movement. The Huskies entered the game shooting nearly 35% from 3-point range but began 0-for-7 against the Irish, and they logged just three assists on 14 made field goals before halftime. Despite forcing six turnovers on five steals, UConn struggled to capitalize with just four points off of turnovers to Notre Dame’s seven.
The Irish quickly established dominance from 3-point range despite a mediocre shooting performance from the field. UConn took its only lead of the first half, 10-9, late in the first quarter, but after beginning the game 0-for-3 from the field, Hidalgo hit back-to-back 3-pointers that reopened a two-possession lead for Notre Dame.
The sophomore superstar stayed hot in the second quarter to enter halftime with 17 points on 4-for-6 shooting from beyond the arc. The Irish hit 66.7% as a team from 3-point range to balance a 41.7% performance from the field, and UConn couldn’t close the gap even after out-scoring Notre Dame 18-6 in the paint.
Bueckers hit her stride in the second with 10 points while shooting 71%, but sophomore KK Arnold was the only other UConn player that made more than one field goal in the quarter. The Huskies were also swallowed up on the boards, getting out-rebounded 25-16 in the first half and allowing 11 second-chance points to the Irish.
Strong finally sank the first 3-pointer for UConn early in the third quarter, and the Huskies began to slowly chip away at Notre Dame’s lead. They got within two points behind a 6-0 run with under three minutes left in the third, kicked off by a pull-up jumper from Bueckers off a textbook screen from Strong. Strong played the entire second half with three fouls after picking up her third early in the second quarter, and she spent more minutes on the floor than anyone except Bueckers.
Bueckers then grabbed a steal and dished an assist to Strong for a layup, and Arnold added a jumper to force an Irish timeout. Bueckers and Arnold hit another pair of layups in the final seconds to cut the Irish’s lead to a single point, but Hidalgo drained her sixth 3-pointer of the game at the buzzer to keep the Irish ahead by two scores.
“I thought the fouls in the first half really set (Strong) back a little bit,” Auriemma said. “This is the first time in her career that she faced an environment like this, and she’s only going to get better and better. I thought there were times where she was a little more passive than she can be. Other times this year she really took on an aggressive mentality. I don’t know if the fouls maybe made her a little more passive, but we need her.”
UConn couldn’t find any momentum after Hidalgo’s buzzer-beater, allowing Notre Dame to open up a double-digit lead less than three minutes into the fourth quarter. The Huskies gave up two steals in as many minutes, and both resulted in points for the Irish. Notre Dame star Olivia Miles, who played just 27 minutes after injuring her ankle in the first quarter, logged nine points in the fourth quarter alone to finish with 16 shooting 6-for-9.
“Each game you take away something that you can use in your next game plan, but every game is different, too,” Auriemma said. “So there’s a couple things that we have to go back and address that are certainly within our our control. Some of it is youth. Some of it is just undisciplined. Some of it is carelessness, so we have to, we have to do a better job with that as coaching staff and as players … And you know, we could have very easily been down 25, and instead we cut it to two, so that that tells us something.”
