STORRS — So Sarah Strong reached this milestone Monday night. Her first 1,000 points at UConn were most notable for the short time it took to get them, and also for the way she got them, such a way as to suggest there are thousands more to come.
Strong got her 1,000th point in her 59th game for the Huskies; only Paige Bueckers and Maya Moore, both in 55 games, did it faster. “I would love to see if anyone has scored 1,000 points taking less shots than Sarah has,” Geno Auriemma said, after the Huskies’ satisfying victory over old nemesis Notre Dame. “Because she’s so efficient.”
Well, Strong is shooting 59.2 percent from the floor. Moore, the Hall of Famer who sits atop the program scoring list with 3,036, shot 52.5 percent in her time, and Bueckers shot 53.1 percent, so it’s entirely possible Strong has taken fewer shots than either of them.
But Strong’s “efficiency” goes deeper than the stats.
“It’s cool, it means a lot to me, I guess,” Strong said, after Azzi Fudd and Kayleigh Heckel stopped clapping. “But I pretty much say thank you to my teammates, I feel I wouldn’t have done that without them.”
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Never a wasted word, never a wasted movement — that’s how Strong does it. Hers is not a heavy metal game, more like horn player making smooth jazz, milking every note for all it’s worth and always in concert with the rest of the band. Never an explosion or out-of-control blaze, just a slow competitive burn that keeps the undefeated and top-ranked Huskies winning by these nice, cozy margins, like the 85-47 win over No. 23 Notre Dame at Gampel Pavilion.
Though you rarely see a glimpse of it, Auriemma does find the buttons and levers that ignite Strong’s fierce pride. The presence of Notre Dame, the presence of Hannah Hidalgo, who had torched UConn twice before and is also in the national player-of-the-year conversation, the memory of a desultory loss in South Bend a year ago were enough to stoke Strong on Monday night.
“There’s a couple of buttons that work great,” Auriemma said. “One is playing against a really good team, against a really good player is another one. Accusing her of being lackadaisical because she makes it look so easy, even though she’s not. Just accuse her of it and that gets her kind of angry. Bringing up something, it’s a simple thing, but she takes great pride in thinking that everything I do has a purpose to it, and there’s a reason why I did it and when you question that, it really pisses her off. So I love that.”
A few games back at Creighton, Auriemma and Strong were heard debating about a foul called late in that UConn blowout.
Coach: “That was a foul.”
Strong: “No, it wasn’t.”
Coach: “Yeah it was.”
And so it went, as Auriemma told it.
Coach: “You let the guy go by you just so you could steal it from behind, that’s dumb.”
Strong: “No, it wasn’t.”
Coach: “That was a bad pass.”
Strong: “No, it wasn’t.”
“… Anything that I can find,” Auriemma said, “Wait ’til tomorrow when we show her getting her shot blocked by Hidalgo. That was gold, that was Steven Spielberg gold for the film session tomorrow. There’s a perfectionism she has. Her game speaks for itself, but she wants to be, ‘I have a complete game, and I don’t like to be called out on something that, for other people, that would be a really, really good play. But she hates to be put in that situation.”
The not-so-classic cinema that worked for this game was Notre Dame’s 79-68 victory over UConn on Dec. 12, 2024. Strong had 14 points and seven rebounds, hardly a no-show, but it wasn’t up to the bar she was already setting for herself as a freshman.
“Last year was an ugly game for all of us,” Strong said. “I just didn’t want to repeat that. Sometimes, that’s extra motivation.”
So Strong took the court at Gampel Pavilion Monday with her third straight Big East player of the week award in hand, her fifth in seven weeks this season. Early in the second quarter, she took a pass from Ashlynn Shade and effortlessly buried a 3-pointer from the top of the key, giving her 1,001 points. She went on to hit 8 of 12 from the floor, 18 points, 11 rebounds, three assists, three blocks, three steals. During one second-half sequence, when KK Arnold was knocked down at one end of the floor, Strong raced back to make a block at the other end.
Another complete game made to look easy. Made her point, nothing to add.
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“I’m not surprised she has gotten to 1,000 this quickly because it’s consistent every night,” Auriemma said. “She doesn’t go two or three games where it comes up empty with four or five or six points. Her consistency is what stands out, kind of like Paige and Maya, and her efficiency. ”
Bueckers, because of her knee injuries, didn’t play her 55th game until her fourth year at UConn, finished with 2,439 points. Moore ended up playing 154 games. Strong, safe to say, is less than halfway through her career, and after sharing the scoring load with Bueckers and Fudd last season, Fudd this season, she will probably need to score more in her last two years, threatening 3,000 if she stays healthy and plays enough minutes in spite of the blowouts that still feel like they will continue forever.
Who was to say, on a night such as this, where the ceiling is for Sarah Strong?
“Whatever I say, she’s already doing it,” Auriemma said. “Those 1,000 points come within the context of what we’re trying to do as a team, it’s not, ‘let’s feed her the ball and get her 1,000.’ No, she’s got a long way to go. Two more years of getting better, I’m anxious to see where it goes. But it’s not going to stay the same.”