Former Hopkins star Paige Bueckers and the UConn Huskies face Caitlin Clark and Iowa in a Final Four showdown on Friday.
WCCO caught up with her former High School Coach Brian Cosgriff to talk about this fantastic run. Cosgriff coached her at Hopkins and now is coaching at Minnetonka. He says winning is nothing new to Paige Bueckers.
"I've known she was going to do it all along if she was healthy," Cosgriff told WCCO Radio. "She won 62 in a row at Hopkins and probably would have won two state championships had COVID not hit."
This past Monday, Bueckers set a single NCAA tournament record as she averaged at least 25 points, 10 rebounds and 6 assists for the third game in a row.
As Huskies coach Geno Auriemma put it, “Today was Paige doing Paige things.”
Bueckers carried UConn to the national semifinals, scoring 28 points in the Huskies’ 80-73 victory over Southern California in a regional final on Monday night. She's doing it with a very limited supporting cast at traditional powerhouse UConn who are missing six key players out for the year with injuries.
That's something Bueckers can relate to, as she has dealt with injuries for most of the last two years. But now she's healthy and Bueckers has kept them moving on, back in the Final Four, her third in four years.
“Now I’m here with my teammates and coaching staff and going to the Final Four,” Bueckers said. “It’s been a very rewarding journey. I’m super, super grateful for it all. The tough times made me who I am. It’s built my faith. It’s built my appreciation for life and gratitude for anything that gets thrown my way.”
"I think she's the best player to ever play in Minnesota, I really do," Cosgriff says.
Bold statement for sure but Bueckers has the receipts to back up the claim.
"She makes everybody around her better," he says. "She just is a great basketball mind, a great teammate. She plays incredibly hard, she's a great defender, she rebounds, she can play any position from the point to the post and she loves playing the game."
And now she gets to face the best player to come out of Iowa. Next up is Caitlin Clark and the Hawkeyes in one of the most anticipated women's sporting events ever.
Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes victory over LSU in the Elite Eight is already the most watched women's basketball game ever, drawing over 12 million viewers. That makes it one of the most viewed sporting events of the year outside of the NFL, even outdrawing NBA Finals games.
It was also ESPN's largest college basketball audience ever (including the men). UConn’s 80-73 win over Southern California, which was on after the Iowa game, was the second-most watched college game in ESPN history at 6.7 million.
Friday night's Final Four semifinal between Iowa and UConn, with star power like Clark and Bueckers? The sky's the limit.