For Bob Bueckers, the first “I can’t believe that just happened” moment with his daughter Paige came when she was around third-grade age and was playing on the fifth-grade basketball team that Bueckers coached. Down five with not much time left and the ball under their team’s basket, Bob drew up a play during a timeout in hopes of hitting a 3.
After catching the inbounds pass, Paige drained a corner 3. Then with time running out, she stole the ball off the opponents’ inbounds pass and connected on a floater to force overtime. Her team eventually lost, but Bob still remembers that moment and the crowd, the collective anticipation for the next game.
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In the years since, Paige has thrown up halfcourt shots and hit numerous daggers with the clock winding down for her high school team in Minnesota. The latest iteration came Monday when Bueckers, now a freshman at UConn, heaved a 3 in the final 15 seconds of overtime against No. 1 South Carolina. After the ball bounced upward, it sailed through the net and the No. 2 Huskies sealed the win, 63-59.
“You’re just like, ‘Wow, that’s just different,’” Bueckers said of his daughter’s thrilling, late-game plays. “She’s just blessed. But that’s just Paige being Paige.”
The game against South Carolina was the first time Bob saw his daughter play for UConn in person. Until that point, because of a COVID-19 scare and a Nor’easter, he hadn’t made the trip up. But forecasted snow wasn’t going to stop this trip. So on Sunday, Bueckers, his girlfriend and Paige’s brother Drew drove up to Connecticut from Maryland. Paige’s mom, Amy Fuller, was also in attendance.
Bob Bueckers had been up to UConn a few times before, including when he helped Paige move in. The first visit for a game was a “heck of a time” to be there, as he said. While he’s watched every one of her games multiple times from home, he enjoyed the in-person experience, noticing certain details he wouldn’t have caught on television. One such observation was the way Paige interacts with her teammates. On a team with seven freshmen and many eccentric personalities, he was able to see their chemistry up close.
Bueckers turned off his phone at halftime to soak up the moment, and by the time he turned it on a few hours later, he had dozens of missed text messages. Both teams had quiet offensive nights, shooting under 40 percent from the field. But once Paige got on a roll, her dad noticed she was finding a rhythm and not forcing anything to get UConn back in the game.
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“Once she got cooking in that midrange area, I was like, ‘Wow, OK, now we got something,’” he said.
It was a relief for Bueckers that South Carolina missed multiple attempts in the final seconds that would have ended the game. Instead the two teams went to overtime, and after Paige had scored UConn’s final four points in regulation to tie the game, Bueckers felt the momentum was with the Huskies.
When Paige threw up that miracle 3, he watched the ball bounce straight up, thinking it had a chance. After it sailed straight through the net without hitting the rim, he turned to his girlfriend in disbelief: “I think I said something, like, ‘That’s when you know she’s been blessed, because that doesn’t happen,” he said. “That’s not normal.”
Bob Bueckers stayed in Connecticut through Thursday afternoon, also catching UConn’s win over Seton Hall on Wednesday. One of the highlights of the visit for Drew, besides seeing his sister, was meeting Jonathan the Husky. Drew, who will be 8 years old next week, has a stuffed husky toy he had with him when he met the real one.
Bueckers felt for his daughter as her high school career ended abruptly last spring when the pandemic shut down sports across the country, and then when her arrival to UConn was also pushed back. Once Paige’s high school state championship game was canceled, all she wanted to do was get to UConn. Paige finally arrived to campus in the summer but didn’t play a game until December. And she hasn’t wasted the playing time she’s had: She leads UConn in scoring (21.1 points per game), steals (39) and assists (91) and has hit double figures in all but one of her 16 games. She’s become a clutch scorer in critical moments and doesn’t shy away from taking those last-second shots, a trait her dad says she’s always had.
Paige’s streak of consecutive 20-point games ended at six Friday at Georgetown. She still came close, recording 19 points and nine assists in UConn’s win. She doesn’t seem to be slowing down based on her play, but after Friday’s win, she said she has had to intentionally refocus at times this season.
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“There were a couple practices that I just wasn’t there mentally and it kind of made me take a few steps back and realize, ‘Like all right, I need to check back in,’” Paige said. “It was a tough time. But I try not to show it on my face and show it in my emotions just because my team needs me, my coaches need me, and I can’t be in my own head about things. I just have to stay confident. But the pressure, I try not to focus on it really. I’m just trying to do what my team needs me to do. All the other outside noise, it doesn’t really matter to me because I’m not focused on anybody else’s opinions. I’m not going to be perfect for anybody. Everybody’s always going to have something to say. But the voices that I care about, those are the people that I’m going to listen to.”
As Paige builds on her already impressive freshman season, there’s a feeling that her next heroic game or improbable shot is around the corner, especially when UConn gets to the NCAA Tournament.
For Bob Bueckers, the trip simply confirmed his daughter is in the right place.
“It was cool to see her living her dream life, that’s how I sense it,” he said. “She’s living her dream.”
(Photo: David Butler II / USA TODAY Sports)
