HARTFORD — It was evident ahead of the opening tip-off when 5-foot-9 Jovana Popovic had to move her hand above her head to high-five 6-foot-2 Addison Bjorn that the UConn women’s basketball team was at a noticeable size disadvantage versus Texas.
Around the Husky logo embossed at midcourt, four Longhorns stood 6-foot-1 or taller, including the always-imposing Madison Booker and 6-foot-4 Breya Cunningham, against the three 5-foot-9 guards of Connecticut, flanked by Sarah Strong and Jana El Alfy.
It was also obvious after the first possession that Texas was trying — rather stubbornly — to exploit its size advantage, feeding the ball to Cunnigham on the block in isolation and engineering open looks for Booker on the elbow throughout the first quarter.
But the Huskies, undeterred, would adapt to the low-post onslaught, switching everything and caving in along the lane with help defense en route to an 83-61 win.
“I thought that would be a big challenge this year: Can we be tough enough to handle a bad shooting night or things that don’t go our way?” Geno Auriemma said post-game. “I liked the way we approached it tonight; I liked the way our big guys were able to rebound.”
UConn won on the defensive glass, 25-23, and shored up a minus-eight rebounding mark in the first half to minus-two in the second. It also outscored Texas in the paint, 34-26, while limiting the Longhorns to just five second-chance points.
But how? Well, it wasn’t always easy.
Twelve of Texas’ 17 first quarter points came in the paint as the Longhorns put an early stranglehold on the glass, grabbing three offensive rebounds for four second-chance points in the first 10 minutes. El Alfy and Strong struggled to fight around box outs while Booker’s elbow jumpers caromed off the front rim and into the arms of Cunningham for open lay-ins.
“Their style of play is very unique, very different than what you normally see,” Geno Auriemma said. “They spend a lot of their possession running Madison Booker off every kind of screen imaginable. You’ve got to fight through all those and you have to work really, really hard and then she scores over you anyway. So, it’s a really difficult assignment.”
Texas was imposing its will down low, but UConn never switched to a three-big lineup to counter, instead opting to switch one-through-five and allowing one of Strong, El Alfy or Vukosa to rotate onto Cunningham and the other to switch onto Booker on pick-and-rolls.
The results were tangible: UConn cut Texas’ paint points in half from 12 to six in the second quarter and didn’t surrender an offensive rebound. Connecticut rallied from down five to tie the game at the half, too, scoring 10 paint points in the process.
“Their size and their length was a little bit of an issue in the first half,” Auriemma said. “It took us a while, but once I think we started to get better movement, things kind of opened up for us.”
With the guards freed up from the war in the paint, UConn began to stretch its lead from behind the arc in the third, hitting on 3-of-7 attempts from 3 and winning on the glass while building a nine-point lead.
“We picked up our pressure,” Strong said of what changed defensively in the second half. “We were talking and focusing on who was guarding Madison Booker and do our best, as a team, to shut her down. She still did what she did, but I think we were able to pull through.”
And it only ballooned from there. Strong poured in 12 in a row in between the third and fourth quarters while Vukosa matched Cunningham on the glass.
Strong finished with a game-high 27 points on 12-of-21 shooting, 11 of which came in the paint; Vukosa, meanwhile, grabbed four rebounds in 18 minutes and added all three of her points from the free throw line.
“I thought Connecticut was really tough tonight,” Texas head coach Vic Schaefer said. “I thought we got out-toughed. We couldn’t make a contested shot; we couldn’t make a contested layup.”
Auriemma never reverted to having all three healthy bigs — Blanca Quiñonez, a presumed starter, was out again, remember — on the court together to chip away at Texas’ edge down low. It was a defensive stick-to-itiveness and willingness to match the Longhorns’ physicality in one-on-one situations that propelled Connecticut to a marquee preseason victory.