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UConn star Paige Bueckers is one of the best players that women’s college basketball has to offer and seems poised to ascend to the throne Caitlin Clark will vacate when she heads to the WNBA. While it was clear she had talent from an early age, it’s still hard not to be impressed by a guy who predicted she’d be a star when she was still in sixth grade.
If you played basketball (or really any organized sport) growing up, there’s a very good chance you encountered someone you realized was simply built different at some point; the kind of person who possesses skills that make everyone else on the court look foolish and make you wonder why you even bothered pursuing the pastime in the first place.
That was the kind of wake-up call I got in high school when I was unfortunate enough to end up sharing the same basketball court with Kris Dunn, and it’s safe to assume plenty of people who faced off against Paige Bueckers when she was making a name for herself prior to joining the UConn Huskies found themselves grappling with similar feelings of helplessness.
Bueckers bounced back in a big way this season after missing the previous campaign due to a torn ACL (a setback that came in the wake of the leg fracture that derailed her sophomore season) and has the chance to help UConn punch their ticket to the national championship game by winning their Final Four showdown with Iowa on Friday.
The Minnesota native cemented herself as the top recruit in her class during her time at Hopkins High School, and the fact that she was still in seventh grade when she made her debut with that squad speaks volumes about the promise she showed.
It’s safe to say a prep basketball coach named Gary Knox was very ahead of the curve when it came to predicting her rise, as fans were understandably impressed by a resurfaced tweet posted on September 24, 2013 that recently made the rounds where he told the world to “remember the name” of the sixth grader he compared to Diana Taurasi at the time.
In a follow-up Knox posted earlier this year, he noted Bueckers caught his eye at an open gym where she “did her thing against the high schoolers,” and he was certainly onto something based on what’s transpired since then.