When senior center Serah Williams announced that she was transferring to the UConn women’s basketball team after three years at Wisconsin in April, it was widely lauded as one of the biggest additions of the offseason.
Even coming off a dominant national championship run, the Huskies were missing a dominant post presence in 2024-25, and Williams seemed like the perfect fit to create a new “Big Three” in Storrs alongside returning superstars Sarah Strong and Azzi Fudd. Preseason expectations entering 2025-26 were sky high: Williams landed on multiple national player of the year watchlists, and ESPN rated her the No. 3 most impactful transfer of the cycle.
But 13 games into the year, it’s fair to say Williams hasn’t yet lived up to the hype. She often looks more like the fourth or fifth best player on the floor for the Huskies rather than competing with Strong and Fudd for the spotlight. She is also the only member of the starting lineup averaging fewer than 23 minute per game — currently at 18.6 after UConn’s 94-47 rout of Butler on Sunday.
She has a box score plus-minus of plus-11.4 during a stretch where the Huskies are winning by nearly 38 points per game, and she is sixth on the team in the stat. Strong leads with a plus-30 followed by Fudd at plus-21.1 and KK Arnold at plus-16.8, while Blanca Quinonez and Allie Ziebell also outrank Williams off the bench.
“It’s definitely been an adjustment just figuring out how to play with other people and also not being as passive,” Williams said back in November. “I have to take chances and trust myself. My teammates trust me, (so) just playing my game without feeling like I need to take a step back.”
It would be completely unrealistic to expect Williams’ production at UConn to resemble the eye-popping numbers she put up as the clear No. 1 option at Wisconsin over the last three years. She was the Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year averaging 17.4 points, 10.7 rebounds and 2.8 blocks as a sophomore in 2023-24, then averaged 19.2 points, 9.8 rebounds, 2.3 blocks and 1.1 steals to earn first-team all-conference honors last season. She took 15 field goal attempts per game in 2024-25, a number not even Strong and Fudd are hitting on UConn’s roster.
The transition to the Huskies’ system has been more challenging than Williams expected by her own admission, but she has made visible improvements throughout the early part of the season. Williams doesn’t yet have a standout full-game performance, but there are stretches where she shows how high her ceiling is. She put up six consecutive points to break open UConn’s early lead against No. 17 USC and scored 12 in just 14 minutes to help power a 100-68 rout of No. 19 Ohio State. She had a season-high nine rebounds against the Trojans, and she’s made strides as a passer with at least two assists in four of the last five games.
Williams is also consistently an impact player on defense. She currently has the best steal percentage of her career and a higher block percentage than she did in her final season at Wisconsin, averaging 1.6 per game. She helped hold Iowa center Ava Heiden, the team’s leading scorer, to just eight points on 4-for-11 shooting in UConn’s 90-64 win over the No. 14 Hawkeyes, and USC’s bigs combined for two points going 1-for-5 against the Huskies’ frontcourt.
“She looked confident and aggressive, and she owned the paint whether it was a rebound, whether it was a putback,” Fudd said of Williams after the USC game. “When she was posting up, she wanted that ball. It wasn’t like a fake, like I’m just gonna pretend. When she went in, she meant business, and it was a lot of fun to see her play with that confidence that we all believe she can have.”
But some glaring concerns remain. Williams has been underwhelming as a rebounder at 6 feet 4, averaging just 4.8 boards per game, and her total rebounding percentage — which accounts for minutes a player is on the floor — is the lowest it has been since her freshman year at 14.7%. Williams’ free throw rate is also down significantly, and she’s shooting a career-low 55.6% at the line after hitting better than 78% in each of the previous two seasons.
Williams’s struggles are highlighted by the emergence of Quinonez as a more versatile and reliable option in the frontcourt. The freshman forward is splitting minutes with Williams off the bench and has established herself as the teams No. 3 scoring option averaging 10.5 points per game. Quinonez shoots 58.4% from the field and nearly 58% from 3-point range, and she is developing into an elite defensive disruptor averaging 2.6 steals over the last five games.
“Serah Williams should get a lot more production, whether its against (the Big East), all these other teams we’ve played — Big Ten teams that we played, ACC teams that we played,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said after Williams had just six points and two boards against DePaul on Dec. 7. “She should be more productive and touch the ball more often, go rebound the ball more often. I think that’s a decision she needs to embrace, ‘I should be dominant.’”
There’s still plenty of time for Williams to evolve into something more closely resembling the player that dominated at Wisconsin, and her current trajectory resembles those of other first-year transfers at UConn. It took Princeton transfer Kaitlyn Chen until the middle of Big East play to hit her stride in 2024-25. Chen had just three double-digit scoring performances through her first 19 appearances, then a run of six over the Huskies’ final 12 regular-season games. Her assists per game spiked during the NCAA Tournament, and she had her best postseason showing when the Huskies needed it most, dropping 15 points in their closest game of the tournament against USC.
The only other post player UConn has added during the transfer portal era (since 2019) is Dorka Juhasz, who needed a full year in the Huskies’ system before her production began approaching the numbers she put up in her first three seasons at Ohio State. Juhasz, who later went on to make the 2023 WNBA All-Rookie team, mostly came off the bench and played less than 20 minutes per game when she transferred to UConn in 2021-22, and she didn’t begin to find a rhythm that first season until early February. When she returned in 2022-23, Juhasz started every game she appeared in and averaged a near double-double with 14.2 points and 9.9 rebounds.
“The challenge initially is the pace of the game, the physicality and the quickness that (Williams) has to deal with both with her teammates and how we play, our style of play,” Auriemma said. “It’s really much more difficult for big guys, so I think that the change in just about everything is going to take a little bit of time, but I like the direction that we’re going.”