STORRS, Conn. — Stefanie Dolson was lazy, Coach Geno Auriemma said recently. Then he reconsidered. Lazy was the wrong word. But as a freshman, Dolson did not arrive at Connecticut last fall with a real understanding of the demand for hard work on a team that has won seven national basketball championships.
“If you’ve been walking your whole life and you start jogging, you’re still not running,” Auriemma said.
In November, Dolson, a 6-foot-5 center from Port Jervis, N.Y., played only 12 minutes before drawing her fifth foul against Baylor’s 6-8 Brittney Griner. UConn won, 65-64, but Dolson was left to watch much of the game on the bench with Auriemma.
“In the beginning of the year, I wouldn’t say I was lazy,” the effusive Dolson, 19, said. “I felt like I was working hard, but it wasn’t anything compared to the rest of the players. Halfway through the season, I don’t want to say I had a revelation, but a realization that I wasn’t working as hard as everybody else. I think I changed that.”
She began doing extra cardiovascular workouts with the team trainer, arriving a half-hour before practice, or showing up on days off, riding an exercise bike, strengthening her core muscles, performing shooting drills.
“In practice, I pushed myself to where I was uncomfortable,” Dolson said. “When I got to that point, I think things really changed for me and my game.”
The Huskies (32-1), seeded first in the Philadelphia Region, open N.C.A.A. tournament play Sunday at home against Hartford. Through the tournament, Dolson will be an indispensable player on a talented but short-handed team that has only one reliable player off the bench, guard Lorin Dixon.
Since losing to Stanford in late December, and snapping a record 90-game winning streak, UConn has won 20 straight. Dolson, who averages 10.2 points and 5.8 rebounds, has been vital to that success with increased endurance, nimble feet, a reliable midrange jumper, alert passing, avoidance of foul trouble, and the ability to turn and shoot over either shoulder.
“She’s a very skilled player,” Syracuse Coach Quentin Hillsman said. “Usually, if you put a defender on someone’s left shoulder, she can’t go the other way. Dolson can turn both ways and make shots. She’s tough and has a lot of confidence.”
In the Big East tournament, Dolson twice delivered a career-high 24 points and played 104 of a possible 120 minutes. Maya Moore was named the most valuable player, but she suggested, along with Auriemma, that Dolson was more deserving.
“Now that we have someone like her we can count on night in and night out, we have a chance,” Auriemma told reporters at the conference tournament. “If she hadn’t developed to the point she is right now, we wouldn’t have any chance going into the N.C.A.A.’s.”
This is the season when 6-5 Elena Delle Donne, the nation’s top recruit in 2008, was to have emerged and flourished at center for UConn after the graduation of Tina Charles.
But Delle Donne left UConn after only two weeks that summer and said she was burned out on basketball and wanted to remain home to be near a disabled sister. She is now playing basketball at Delaware, which did not make the N.C.A.A. tournament.
This season brought more defection. The freshman forward Samarie Walker transferred to Kentucky in January, saying her commitment to basketball had waned.
Injury further depleted the UConn frontcourt. The reserve center Heather Buck missed the Big East tournament with a stress reaction in her left foot. She is expected to be available for the N.C.A.A. tournament, but Buck has played limited minutes this season and has not performed with much confidence.
Given this thin roster, Auriemma has been forced to introduce some caution or prudence at the defensive end. UConn does not forcefully press the way it usually does. The Huskies seem to have played more zone defense than in previous seasons. And, to give Dolson a breather, the 6-foot Moore has sometimes played center in a small lineup.
“We had to be a little more territorial,” Auriemma said. “We’ve got to pick the ground we want to defend. We can’t defend a lot of the court, but we’ve gotten really good at defending the right areas of the court.”
Another trip to the Final Four appears highly likely, given that UConn will play the first two tournament rounds at home and defeated Duke, the No. 2 seed in the Philadelphia Region, 87-51 in late January. The Huskies possess a relentlessness and determination unmatched by many teams. But injury and foul trouble could derail a third consecutive championship season.
At the Final Four in Indianapolis, UConn would most likely face bigger and deeper teams like Tennessee and either Baylor or Stanford. Moore and Dolson, most urgently, must remain on the floor if the Huskies are to have any chance of cutting down the nets in early April to celebrate an eighth N.C.A.A. title.
“The biggest thing is fouls,” Dolson said. “We know we can’t do dumb things. Stupid fouls could kill a game. We don’t have the luxury to sub, sub, sub. But I think we’ve gotten to the point where we know that and we are comfortable that we can still play aggressive. Some people are counting us out. I’m not.”
For Auriemma, four months have seemed like a lifetime in Dolson’s maturation. The player who fouled out in 12 minutes against Baylor in November does not resemble the player who dominated the Big East tournament.
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