‘I can’t believe that happened’: The WNBA draft’s most unbelievable story
Lou Lopez Senechal knocks down the open three off an Azzi Fudd dish to get the scoring started for UConn. (0:19)
LOU LOPEZ SÉNÉCHAL folds her 6-foot-1 frame into a cushioned chair at the UConn bookstore on the Storrs campus. It’s the day before the Huskies fly to Seattle for the women’s NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16, and the woman who started her life in Mexico, lived most of it in France, swung through Ireland and became a basketball star in the United States wants to talk about a rhinoceros in South Africa.
Her family loves sharing this story, she says, her French accent trickling into her English words. Wearing a light blue sweatshirt and blue joggers, her wavy hair that is pinned in a bun when she is on the court cascades down her shoulders as she moves her arms animatedly.
She was 16 years old and sitting in a Jeep between her mom and stepdad on a safari at Kruger National Park when she noticed a rhino atop a hill a few hundred meters away. Suddenly, it charged at a speed that seemed impossible for a creature so large. Lou crouched in her seat, held her ground and refused to look away, preferring to stare her challenger in the eye.
On one side, her mom couldn’t bear to look and shut her eyes tight. On the other, her stepdad scooched over to position himself between Lou and death. Lou didn’t budge. She stared down the mighty mammal while her brain tried to convince her that she was about to die, but her heart held out hope. With the rhino just a few feet away, Lou closed her eyes.
Just then, the guide made a loud screeching noise that brought the rhino to a stop a few feet short of the Jeep. It turned around and sped away in the same direction it came from. When Lou opened her eyes, all she could see was dust kicked up by the retreating rhino.
Back at the bookstore, Lou sips her coffee and sends a smile across her face as she indulges in the unlikely memory. It’s one of the many unforeseen events — a full ride to play basketball at an American college, leading Fairfield to its first conference title in 24 years, transferring to the most prestigious program in women’s NCAA basketball, becoming one of the breakout stars of the 2022-23 season — in her 24 years of life. They have all led her here, to perhaps the most surprising place of all: the brink of a professional basketball career in the WNBA.
“I can’t believe that happened to me,” she says.
TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHTY.
That’s the number of U.S. colleges a 19-year-old Lopez Sénéchal emailed asking for a shot to play basketball. Each time she hit the send button, she’d cross her fingers, hoping somebody — anybody — would take a look at the highlight video she had painstakingly put together. That they would care enough to skim through her carefully curated résumé. That they would take a minute to respond. Even a rejection would be something.
Her email campaign started after a chance conversation with a friend while Lopez Sénéchal was attending the North Atlantic Basketball Academy in Ireland. “I’m going to Canada to play college basketball,” her friend had said. Until then, Lopez Sénéchal didn’t think college basketball in the Americas was even an option. After the conversation, it was all she could think about.
The lightbulb didn’t come on with a flip of a switch. For a year after high school, Lopez Sénéchal had been stuck at a crossroads. A nagging physical issue, combined with her uncertainty about what a life without basketball would look like, left her stuck at home in Grenoble, France. Eventually, she realized she wasn’t ready to leave basketball behind, so she and her stepdad, Tim Presto, sent a highlight video to coaches at the North Atlantic Basketball Academy. It was close to France, which would enable her to come home for the holidays, and it would give her a chance to learn English.
Dermot Russell, the head coach at the co-ed academy, was in bed at midnight when the email from Lou popped up. He clicked on the video. Then he clicked replay over and over again.
“She’s a diamond in the rough,” he thought. “I was like, ‘This girl, we need to get this girl in.'”
At the academy, Lopez Sénéchal was one of the best — male or female — in the gym. For a year, she trained early in the morning with the boys, took English classes in the early afternoon and came back to practice later in the afternoon. Her shooting got better. She got faster. She got used to a physical style of play. Everything improved.
“The boys — it’s a much quicker game,” Russell says. “Her release got so much quicker when she finished with us here.”
Not only did her game improve, but her confidence soared. Just as she was trying to figure out her next steps, that chance conversation with her friend provided answers.
If she can do it, Lopez Sénéchal thought, I can definitely do it.
She turned again to her stepdad and mom, Sophie Sénéchal, and asked them what they thought of the idea. She got an easy yes.
But how could she get an American college to give her a shot? How could she prevent them from underestimating an unknown player from France? Lopez Sénéchal and Presto got to work.
She knew next to nothing about the college basketball system in the United States. So Presto, who grew up in America, walked her through how the divisions worked and what kind of opportunities were realistic. The idea took a firm root in Lopez Sénéchal’s mind. She might not be able to play for the best teams in the U.S., but she knew she was good enough to try out for the smaller teams.
Presto was the organizer in the family. He made a spreadsheet — complete with names of universities, names of coaches, assistant coaches, email addresses — and shared it with Lopez Sénéchal. Then they made a highlight reel and Lopez Sénéchal updated her résumé. Together, they wrote a template email that would later become the template all the athletes at the North Atlantic Basketball Academy would use. It was short, it was to the point. The main idea: I am a hidden gem in France. If you give me a chance, you won’t be disappointed.
Between Lopez Sénéchal and Presto, they sent emails to 280 schools, targeting both Division I and Division II. The only coaches off limits? The ones at teams ranked in the top 25, which seemed like a stretch too far.
Even though they had a template, they made every email personal, and circled back to each school two or three times.
“Tim was a freak with that, and in the best way,” Lopez Sénéchal says.
“It was literally like a full-time job,” Presto says.
This went on for four months, from November 2017 to February 2018. Then, one morning, Lopez Sénéchal woke up to … surprise!
Tulsa. Akron. Duquesne. UMass Lowell. Fairfield. …
Lopez Sénéchal couldn’t believe her eyes.
LOPEZ SÉNÉCHAL WAS 5 years old when it was her ears she couldn’t believe.
Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, on May 12, 1998, to her French mom and her Mexican father, Carlos Lopez, Lou was on vacation in Grenoble, France, visiting her grandparents, when Sophie told Lou that she and Carlos were separating. Mom and daughter would stay in France, and Lou would start school there.
Why can’t we go back? I am not going to see my friends anymore? Why are you doing this to me?
The questions kept coming. Sophie stayed quiet and allowed Lou to process.
Overnight, Lou stopped speaking Spanish. It was a painful reminder of the life she was forced to leave behind. For the first three months at her new school, Sophie would hear from teachers that Lou, an ebullient child, sat at the back of the room and did not say a word. For the first time in her life, Sophie heard teachers refer to her daughter as “shy.”
Soon, Sophie met Presto and the two began dating, but Sophie introduced Presto to Lou as her friend, wanting to take her time with things. Lou and Presto got along famously, spending hours playing soccer or skiing. Then, when she was 7 years old, Sophie and Presto took Lou on a ski trip in Grenoble. They packed a picnic. It was a big day — they were going to inform Lou that they were more than friends, that they were a couple. Sophie softly broached the subject when they sat down to eat. Sophie remembers Lou turning bright red as she processed the news. She promptly stood up and began skiing as hard as she could away from Sophie and Presto.
“My brain just switched. It was almost like they betrayed me, it felt like that,” Lou says. “[I thought], ‘He’s my friend. Why are you guys doing this?'”
Presto jumped to action, following her and soon catching up to her. He decided to appeal to her sweet tooth. He took her to her favorite crepes store and bought her Nutella crepes. Lou took her time warming up to the idea, but for the time being, the crepes helped.
After the separation of her parents, Lou would return to Mexico to visit Carlos and his family in Guadalajara once a year. Carlos remembers being struck by his daughter’s boundless energy.
Whenever she left him to return to France, and his house turned quiet, he would fax her drawings he made for her, drawings of her wearing a shirt with a big star and traveling far and wide across the universe. Drawing was his way of showing his daughter that he loved her. Years later, Sophie would make an album for Lou with every single drawing Carlos had sent. “That was moving,” he says.
Apart from becoming quick friends with Presto, Lou remembered two moments from her childhood in France that helped bring her out of her shell. One was meeting her friends, Julia and Alexia, who saw her playing by herself on the school playground one day and made their way to her, sharing their toys. They didn’t ask her why she had an accent, or why she was quiet in class. That felt life-changing to Lou.
Then, when Lou was 8, she tried basketball for the first time. Lou remembered the coaches drawing two circles on the court for kids to learn foot placement for a layup. Lou had grown up playing soccer. She was good with her legs. And she loved running. She would run all day long if she could. But she had to use her hands to dribble while running. That was new. But the most exhilarating part: It was the first time in France she truly felt at home. Every kid looked like her, confused and trying to learn something new. On the basketball court, she no longer felt like an outsider. On the basketball court, she felt like an equal.
Both Presto and Sophie shared a memory of a 10-year-old Lou on the basketball court.
Lou was playing in a regional tournament in the south of France. She had sat on the bench for most of the tournament, her legs shaking nervously, when her coach called her name. As one of the youngest players on the under-12 team and the shortest (she was barely 5-feet tall, her growth spurt came in her teenage years), she had played just a few minutes in the entire tournament, but her coach wanted her in for the last quarter of the regional final.
Her team was either up by 30 or down by 30 (nobody, including Lou, can remember), but her playing time would have no bearing on the game. That much was clear.
With five minutes left, Lou was on defense when one of her opponents, who Presto swears was twice his stepdaughter’s size (“She’s probably playing rugby right now,” he says), drove the baseline. Hard. Lou stepped in front of the girl, planting her feet. The opponent smashed into Lou and fell directly on top of her.
“All I saw was just Lou disappear behind this girl,” Presto says.
The entire gym let out a collective groan.
Tears leaked out of Sophie’s eyes as she involuntarily slapped her hands to her mouth. Presto cried too — but because he was so proud of his stepdaughter’s bravery. The next few seconds felt excruciatingly long to Sophie and Presto. They were sure she would need to go to the hospital.
Then, the girl rolled off Lou. Lou stood up and fixed her hair. She ran to the other side of the court and skipped, a bright smile on her face. She got a charging call.
“This is the hardest girl I’ve ever seen,” Presto remembers thinking.
“I saw that she was extremely ready to do anything that was to be done for the team,” Sophie says. “And I don’t even know if she really thought further than that.”
WHEN LOPEZ SÉNÉCHAL arrived for a visit at the Fairfield campus, she knew she was home. It reminded her of Europe. And she loved coach Joe Frager and the team he was trying to build.
Frager had watched the video Lopez Sénéchal and Presto sent. He remembered the assistant coaches calling him into the film room and asking him to take a look. He made up his mind immediately: He needed to bring her in.
Frager had set up a 45-minute workout. A nervous Lopez Sénéchal walked onto the court, mumbling to herself that she’d give it her best. She would show him that she deserved a spot on his team. Within the first minute, Lopez Sénéchal attempted a smooth crossover and finished at the rim with a finger roll.
“She was just so buttery smooth when she made the move and we loved her release on her shot,” Frager said. “It was like, wow, this is a legitimate jump shot. And at 6-1 with a nice high release — that’s going to be really [effective], especially with the way we played.”
Ten minutes into the workout, Frager waved Lopez Sénéchal over. He had seen enough. She was perfect for his program.
In addition to her talent on the court, Frager also noticed that Lopez Sénéchal was mature and adaptable. She was two years older than the other incoming freshmen, she spoke three languages and was down to earth. He knew she would fit right in at Fairfield.
Frager offered her a shot at Division I basketball immediately after the workout.
Without hesitating, Lopez Sénéchal said yes. At age 20, she was headed to America.
There is a running joke in the Sénéchal family. If you pack up Lou and send her to Mongolia, she will become best friends with everybody there. That’s how life at Fairfield began. She Instagram messaged her classmates before she arrived on campus. “I was like, ‘This recruit is already messaging me,'” Fairfield teammate Sam Kramer says. Her teammate Andrea Hernangomez arrived from Spain a few weeks after Lopez Sénéchal (a large international student-athlete contingent was one of the main reasons Lopez Sénéchal picked Fairfield) and Hernangomez remembered instantly connecting with her about living away from home. “We became like sisters,” Hernangomez says.
On the court, Lopez Sénéchal thrived. Despite having to sit out the first nine games of the season because she played a few club games in Ireland, she was named Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Rookie of the Year — a first for Fairfield in 15 years since Candice Lindsay in 2004 — and led her team with 11.8 points per game.
Frager noticed, early on, that Lopez Sénéchal was selfless on the court — so much so that he thought it was to her detriment. She would pass up shots because she wanted her teammates to be involved. “I had to get her into the mindset of, you’re not being selfish by shooting the ball, you’re helping the team,” Frager says. “If you pass shots up, you’re actually not doing your job.”
Another trait that stuck out to Frager and her teammates was Lopez Sénéchal’s passion. Early in her freshman season during practice, Lopez Sénéchal missed a few 3-pointers. She got so worked up that she made a fist and slugged the basket support as hard as she could.
“I pulled her over and I said, ‘Really? You missed three shots in practice and you’re going to break your hand on the basket support? We’re going to lose you for half the season.’ And she’s like, ‘OK, I get it. I get it.'” Frager says.
Kramer recollected Lopez Sénéchal sobbing on the bus after a loss against Rider in her freshman year.
“She has a great game, drops 40 points and loses, she’ll be crying,” Kramer says. “It’s really all about winning for Lou.”
When COVID-19 cut her 2020 sophomore season short, Lopez Sénéchal stayed with Kramer at her parents’ house in New Jersey. Kramer, two years her senior and who graduated that year, introduced Lopez Sénéchal to her high school assistant coach and personal trainer. Lopez Sénéchal trained every day, first in the makeshift gym in Kramer’s house, and then on their outdoor basketball court. She cooked meals for Kramer and her family, and treated Kramer’s new dog, Riley, as her own. Every day, she Zoomed with her mom in France and together they would do YouTube yoga classes. As soon as she could travel, Lopez Sénéchal left for Grenoble. But basketball — and the MAAC championship — remained her focus.
Back in Grenoble, Lopez Sénéchal would wake up, lift weights and then make her way to the public basketball court near her home. Presto would take a lunch break from his work and play one-on-one with her. He would play a physical style — and he would cheat. “I couldn’t win otherwise,” he says.
One day, Lopez Sénéchal was focusing on shooting and ballhandling drills and nothing was going right. Over and over again she missed. She berated herself, kicked the basketball in anger. “Lou, you have to push through moments like this,” Presto told her.
He watched her intently. She took a few breaths as sweat dripped from her forehead. She walked close to the basket and started shooting one-handed form shots. Then, once she was satisfied, she backed up. And then backed up again.
Finally she was at the 3-point line. She drilled something like 22 consecutive shots — everyone lost count — but parents and kids alike stopped and watched. “Are you a professional basketball player?” they asked.
A sheepish grin appeared on Lopez Sénéchal’s face. No, I am not, but I play for a college in the U.S.
Lopez Sénéchal and Presto were two hours late for lunch as the kids watched in awe. An anxious Sophie had called them several times, but Presto had ignored her calls. He didn’t want to disrupt the magic.
Lopez Sénéchal brought the lesson on how to control her emotions back to Fairfield, which helped elevate her from the Stags’ star to their leader. Hernangomez remembered a practice when her misses multiplied and her disposition deteriorated. Lopez Sénéchal noticed Hernangomez spiraling, one missed shot leading to another.
“Just visualize that the next shot you’re going to get is going to go in,” Hernangomez remembers Lopez Sénéchal telling her. “If you focus on the negative things, negative things come to you.”
As a senior in 2022, Lopez Sénéchal led Fairfield to its first MAAC championship in 24 years. She led the team with 24 points in the championship game, ending her season with 604 points, the second-highest in program history.
“I was laughing, crying, all the emotions, it was things I’ve seen on TV, in the magazine, and I was like, ‘I want to be in that moment so bad,’ and it finally happened,” Lopez Sénéchal says.
Lopez Sénéchal and the Stags traveled to Austin, where they lost to Texas in the first round of the NCAA tournament. But for Lopez Sénéchal, the tournament’s notorious madness was only just beginning.
SITTING IN THE STANDS at Total Mortgage Arena in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Lopez Sénéchal felt the same way the kids back home must have felt that day at the playground when she made all those 3-pointers.
She was watching a classic: UConn vs. NC State in the 2022 Elite Eight. Behind 27 points from Paige Bueckers, the Huskies advanced to the Final Four with a double-overtime win.
“Wow, these women are so good,” Lopez Sénéchal thought.
Just days after her season at Fairfield had ended, Lopez Sénéchal knew she would enter the transfer portal. She was toying with the idea that a professional career in Europe or elsewhere might be possible, but she knew she needed to find a program that could push her, could challenge her, even if it meant spending a season on the bench.
As she let her basketball dreams expand, never once did she consider herself good enough to play for the likes of UConn.
When she entered the portal, Lopez Sénéchal once again tapped Presto to help her track her incoming email.
The next day, Presto woke up at 4 a.m. and found 30 emails from coaches in her inbox, including 15 representing teams in the top 25. Not all that long ago, it was Lopez Sénéchal who was begging coaches to give her a shot. Now the roles were reversed.
“Oh my god,” Presto texted Lopez Sénéchal.
“I know. What do I do?” Lopez Sénéchal texted back.
“Did you see the fourth email?” Lopez Sénéchal texted, after a beat.
“No, I didn’t,” Presto said.
“It’s UConn.”
COACHES TALK. And unbeknownst to Lopez Sénéchal, UConn assistant Morgan Valley had fallen in love with her game and had reached out to Frager, who then got a follow-up from Geno Auriemma.
“I don’t care what level it is, there’s not a program in America that doesn’t want a 6-1 kid that can shoot better than 40% behind the arc,” Frager says.
But what Auriemma focused on during his call with Frager had little to do with basketball skills. Can she manage being under the microscope? Can she endure the demands of the coaching staff? Can she handle the lofty goals of winning a national championship?
“She’s a home run,” Frager told Auriemma.
And to Lopez Sénéchal, Frager said, “You’re going to get better, because every day in practice, you’re going against some of the best players in the country.”
From watching UConn from afar at the Elite Eight game in Bridgeport, Lopez Sénéchal found herself on a Zoom with Auriemma while he was at the Final Four in Minneapolis. He didn’t think she could start for his team, she remembers him saying. He predicted that she would be on the sidelines a lot, but that she would learn.
At the time, she felt excitement about the possibilities, the visibility, the opportunity for improvement that even a spot on the bench could bring. In hindsight, she recalls a different reaction: I am going to prove him wrong.
Presto admits now that one of his biggest regrets was not reaching out to the top 25 schools all those years ago when they made their spreadsheets and sent their emails. “I was so stupid,” he says.
It didn’t take long for Auriemma to come to the same realization.
“When I watched her work out with us in June, I knew right away that we had gotten really lucky,” Auriemma says. “It became pretty much a foregone conclusion that Lou’s gonna be in the starting lineup.”
In her UConn debut against Northeastern, Lopez Sénéchal played the most minutes of anybody on her team, scoring 17 points. A few games later, she scored 23 points and had six rebounds against Duke. Against Tennessee she put up 26 points; against Villanova in the Big East tournament, 22. It wasn’t one game that raised her stock. This was no fluke.
To Auriemma, the January game against Tennessee was emblematic of who Lopez Sénéchal is: fearless. When she realized that her team was struggling in the second quarter, she “took over” the second half of the game, Auriemma says.
“To go down to Tennessee and play the game that she played — that was pretty special,” Auriemma says. “That’s when people started to zone in and pay attention to what she was doing.”
After the Tennessee game, Auriemma told reporters that he didn’t know anybody who was “more important to their team in America than she’s been to us.”
“I said to her two weeks ago, ‘Lou, I really apologize. I know when you left Fairfield you thought, ‘I’m going to Connecticut and I get to relax. Not every shot is life or death.’ And now I’m putting you in a situation where every shot is life or death,'” Auriemma said. “But she said, ‘I’m enjoying it. And I love the moment.’ She loves the moment. … She’s going to make a great pro for somebody.”
WITH SIX MINUTES to go in the first half and UConn trailing by one in its Sweet 16 game against Ohio State, Lopez Sénéchal crumbles to the floor in Seattle. First she feels a pain in her knee, then her ankle. She limps away from the court and heads to the locker room. After a few minutes, she hops on a stationary bike. She pedals and chugs water. UConn trails by 10 when the halftime buzzer sounds. She needs to get back on the court.
She returns for the second half, scores the team’s first basket of the third quarter and then pours in seven more, but UConn still trails by nine heading into the fourth quarter. She adds eight more in the fourth, her final quarter of college basketball. It isn’t enough.
As the buzzer sounds, she hunches forward on court, emotions oozing out of her as her teammate Caroline Ducharme runs over to comfort her. In her final college game, she leads the Huskies with 25 points, but the loss breaks UConn’s 14-year Final Four streak.
“I know she was hurting. I know she was banged up and I know that she did something in the game that further aggravated her knee, and yet she played a great, great game,” Auriemma says. “She just keeps showing how resilient and tough she is mentally and physically.”
For the season that had just ended too soon, Lopez Sénéchal appeared in all 37 games, averaging 15.5 points and converting 44% of her 3-point attempts.
“How many times [this] season have I said she’s the most mature person on our team? That she’s always the same every day, every day, every day and every day. That she brings the exact same thing every day, every day, every day,” Auriemma said to reporters after the game.
The past year has been filled with memorable, life-changing moments, moments Lopez Sénéchal will think back to and add to her Polaroid collection back in her room in Grenoble. She’s been frantically taking photos to make sure she remembers. That’s how she remembered Mexico when she had to suddenly make France her home when she was 5. That’s how she thinks she will process what has transpired in Storrs over the past year.
“It’s going to hit me later,” Lopez Sénéchal says. “There’s so many things [that have happened] this year it’s almost like you don’t have time to sit back and think about what actually happened here.”
She thinks of senior night, when the Storrs crowd cooed “Louuuuuu,” as she walked hand in hand with her mom, stepdad and half-sister onto the court. That same night, an emotional Lopez Sénéchal squared off against a Xavier player and got her only technical foul of the season. “I joked with her [that], ‘You’re going to have to get some boxing or MMA lessons here pretty soon if you’re going to start squaring off with people,'” says Frager, who was in attendance.
She thinks of the Big East tournament, when, after years of planning, her father, Carlos Lopez, watched her play in person for the first time. For the past seven years, every time she blew her birthday candle and made a wish, it was the same thing. “I can share now because it has happened.” I want my dad to watch me play basketball.
When Carlos heard the crowd call out its “Louuuuuu” salute for the first time, he thought the fans were booing her. Then, Sophie explained to him what was going on. It gave him goosebumps.
“A lot of people came to me asking me if I was Lou’s dad, and telling me how much they admire her,” Carlos says. “It was beautiful.”
Hopping on a call a few days after the Sweet 16 loss, Lopez Sénéchal’s voice sounds thick with emotion.
“I’ve seen loss in my life, but this one hurts the most,” she says.
After a beat, she adds, “[This was] one of the best years of my life here, and all the people that I’ve met and all the memories that I’ve created and all the experiences I’ve had … I think that really takes over all the little negative things.”
BACK IN FEBRUARY, Auriemma shared a wish he had for Lopez Sénéchal. He hopes she gets underestimated yet again come April 10, the date of the WNBA draft. He hopes the top teams don’t look at her closely enough to know what they’re missing.
“I always think the later you go in the draft, the better team you get to play on,” he said. “People all want to be the No. 1 pick or No. 2 pick or No. 3 pick. Good. You’re going to a team that can’t win and you’re expected to do all the things to help them win. For some people, that’s great. I like to think that for players like Lou, if she gets on a really good team, she’s going to make a difference, 100 percent.”
Most mock drafts have her listed as a late first-round pick. She still finds it hard to fathom that she’s listed at all. Me in the WNBA? What? She smiles, a look of incredulity washes over her face.
It’s a look that her UConn teammate Dorka Juhász, who is from Hungary and also projected to go in the first round, believes is contagious during this lead-up to the draft — particularly for young girls from countries like Mexico, France and Hungary.
“All the little girls are watching us,” Juhász says. “And just talking about her journey gives them motivation that it can happen for them.”
It’s a journey with no finish line in sight. The very thing that made Lopez Sénéchal effective at UConn will make her effective in the WNBA — her ability to take big shots and not be afraid of the moment, Auriemma says.
“There’s always a need for teams to have people that make a lot of shots and she makes a lot of ’em,” Auriemma says. “And that’s gonna give her an opportunity to showcase what she can do.”
Despite what the mock drafts say, Lopez Sénéchal has no sense of what will happen Monday night in New York. But she’s open to embracing whatever the next twist in her journey might be.
“I’m ready for this next dream,” Lopez Sénéchal says.
A dream that had only recently been allowed to form. A dream she couldn’t fathom back in France when she was seen as little more than a shy kid with a funny accent. A dream that seemed out of reach in Ireland and Fairfield when her ceiling appeared to be far closer to earth. A dream that only materialized after a year when she surprised everyone by emerging as one of the brightest stars in Storrs.
I can’t believe that happened to me.
“I always say there’s never a perfect path, a perfect way,” she says. “There’s your way.”