SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. — Any time Blanca Quinonez steps on the court for the UConn women’s basketball team, her presence is an instant antidote to sluggishness.
The freshman forward made her first appearance in Saturday’s win at Seton Hall three minutes into the first quarter while Huskies were in the midst of their worst start of the season. They gave up a 6-0 opening run to the Pirates, and coach Geno Auriemma called a timeout with the Huskies trailing 10-9 to bring Quinonez off the bench.
By the time she checked back out with three minutes left in the second quarter, UConn was ahead 39-24, and Quinonez had 13 points on 6-for-6 shooting plus a team-high four rebounds, two assists, a block and a steal. Seton Hall scored 28 points in the first half, 14 of which came during the six minutes when the freshman forward was off the court.
“I just try to keep the energy up … and just try to be focused,” Quinonez said. “When you come from the bench, you’ve already watched a little bit of the game and know how it’s going and what is going on, so you try to do the right thing and not (make) the same mistakes if one of your teammates did it before. I think everybody has an important role on this team, and everybody that comes from the bench has to impact the game in the right way.”
Nineteen games into her college career, Quinonez more often looks like seasoned superstar than a teenager playing American basketball for the first time in her life. In less than 20 minutes off the bench, the Ecuador native is UConn’s third-highest scorer averaging 10.7 points, 3.4 rebounds, 2.2 assists and 1.8 steals. She is shooting 57.4% from the field and 40.4% from 3-point range on 2.5 attempts per game, and she is the team’s second-leading scorer in transition behind only national player of the year frontrunner Sarah Strong. WNBA general managers and coaches who come to observe the Huskies in practice have told Auriemma that they wish Quinonez was eligible for this year’s draft.
But the 19-year-old is still far from a finished product, and Auriemma often jokes that her worst moments come from plays that no one else would even think to attempt. She leads the team in both turnovers and personal fouls, and she has turned the ball over at least three times in four of the last five games. But that’s a price UConn is willing and able to pay, currently leading the country as a team in assist-to-turnover ratio and scoring defense.
“Every mistake she makes is from being too aggressive. Rarely does she make mistakes because she’s not paying attention or she’s not engaged,” Auriemma said. “For everything that she does that looks spectacular, whenever she does something that looks like, ‘What the…?’ it’s because she’s trying to make a play all the time. I would rather have a kid like that than a kid like that than a kid who’s constantly afraid to make a play because they may make the wrong play. Those are the hardest kids to coach, so she’s fun to coach in that respect.”
Though he may not always show it in his demeanor on the sideline, Auriemma is embracing the chaos while Quinonez learns how to refine it. He compares the freshman to a quarterback with an explosive arm: It’s better to allow her to take chances that don’t pay off than to limit her potential.
“We had a long talk yesterday about (how) you don’t want to restrain her, because I think if I put too many things in her head about pace, about ‘control yourself,’ I don’t want her all of a sudden to stop being the aggressive, attacking kind of player that she is,” Auriemma said Saturday. “She’s going to throw 10 touchdown passes and you have to live with the five interceptions.”
Auriemma’s favorite thing about working with Quinonez is the freshman’s unusually thick skin for her age. No matter how much he picks on her in the gym, the Huskies coach said Quinonez is rarely fazed and often bounces back with a smile more quickly than he does after a frustrating session.
“She doesn’t take anything personal, which I love. Some young kids, they get all flustered when you try to coach them. She’s just happy-go-lucky and she’s having fun all the time,” Auriemma said. “God bless her, I can say 95 things that she doesn’t like during the course of practice, and we’ll go up to get something to eat and she’ll be like ‘Hello coach, how are you!’ I’m the 12-year-old that’s like don’t talk to me, I don’t wanna be around you … It’s just so refreshing to have her around.”
Quinonez said Auriemma’s hollering makes her feel right at home in Storrs. His style reminds her of her the coaches at Magnolia Campobasso, the professional team she played with for five years while attending high school in Italy.
“It’s something familiar for me to have people yell at me,” Quinonez said with a grin. “I think it makes me personally better and makes me focus on trying to do better next time and keep working, not give up and just say, ‘I’m the worst player in the world.’ Everyone can make mistakes, so I just try to keep working on it and hear what he says, not how he says it. I think that’s the important thing.”
From Ecuador to Italy, how Blanca Quinonez’s journey prepared her for UConn women’s basketball