Paige Bueckers Explains Why Hannah Hidalgo Is a 'Pest' After UConn Loss vs Notre Dame
One of the most compelling matchups of the 2024-25 NCAA women's college basketball season took place on Thursday night, as the No. 2 ranked UConn Huskies took on the No. 8 ranked Notre Dame Fighting Irish on Notre Dame's home turf.
The Irish produced an extremely impressive 79-68 victory, which is their third win against a top-five-ranked team in the country (at the time they played Notre Dame) this season.
Notre Dame sophomore guard Hannah Hidalgo stole the show, as she was the best player on the court all evening on the offensive and defensive end.
The problems that Hidalgo (who tallied 29 points on 8 of 17 from the field, including 6 of 11 from three-point range) posed for the Huskies went unanswered for the entire game. And afterward, UConn star Paige Bueckers (who had an up-and-down night offensively) offered Hidalgo some high praise.
“Notre Dame has a lot of outstanding players, but Hannah is obviously the head of the snake,” Bueckers said, according to a December 12 article from Curt Rallo of the Associated Press. “She does a lot of great things offensively and defensively. She’s a pest. The best thing that she does is her energy and her attitude, and she leads her team with that and her fire."
Huskies head coach Geno Auriemma echoed his best player's sentiment by adding, "[Hidalgo's] talent is obvious. I think, more importantly, is the way she attacks everything that she does. The way she attacks your defense. The way when she’s on defense, she attacks your offense. I think the way that she leads her team in so many different ways.
"You put all those three things together, and it’s a really, really difficult matchup for anybody. She does what she does. I don’t know that there’s a lot of strategies that you can use," he continued.
If Hidalgo keeps this current form up, she seems destined to win National Player of the Year honors by season's end.
Grant Young covers Women’s Basketball, the New York Yankees, and the New York Mets for Sports Illustrated’s ‘On SI’ sites. He holds an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of San Francisco (USF), where he also graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing and played on USF’s Division I baseball team for five years. However, he now prefers Angel Reese to Angels in the Outfield.