TAMPA (WISH) — A pair of Indiana natives are now college basketball champions. UConn sophomore guard Ashlynn Shade and redshirt sophomore forward Ayanna Patterson were each part of the Huskies’ team that captured the 2025 NCAA women’s basketball Div. I title on Sunday afternoon. The No. 2-seeded Huskies beat No. 1-seeded South Carolina 82-59. Shade, a Noblesville, Ind. native, played 20 minutes in the championship game and finished with 4 points. Shade finishes the season having averaged 7.8 points and 2.7 rebounds per game. Meanwhile, Patterson is a Fort Wayne, Ind. native. She suffered a shoulder injury in October and ultimately was forced to miss the season after undergoing a successful surgery for the injury in December. The Huskies’ championship is the 12th in program history, which is the most all-time in both Div. I men’s and women’s basketball. “I do think that each championship is a building block, and the legacy is all those blocks placed on top of each other,” UConn head coach Geno Auriemma said after the victory. Auriemma has been a head coach for all 12 of the Huskies’ titles. The 71-year-old is the oldest head coach in men’s or women’s basketball history to lead his or her team to a national championship. “All those other coaches had the good sense to not stick around until they were 71,” Auriemma said. “Again, we maybe talked about this recently, yes, we all feel our age at some point. We don’t like to admit that we’re older because we still act younger because of the people that we’re dealing with.” UConn guard Azzi Fudd and forward Sarah Strong led the way for UConn on Sunday, each finishing with 24 points. Strong also had 15 rebounds. “We’ve gone to practice every day working hard for this moment,” Strong said. “Just really proud of the team and the way we’ve been playing.” Fudd was named the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player. She also scored 19 points in the Huskies’ national semifinal win over UCLA on Friday. “I scored a lot of points but I just did what my teammates — they sent me great screens, got me the ball,” Fudd said. “I didn’t get outside of myself. I read what the game was giving me.” The victory also gave UConn guard Paige Bueckers her first career championship in her final collegiate game. “Very validating to all the hard work we put in as individuals and as a team and how much we stuck together through the good times and the bad and how connected we were,” Bueckers said. “We feel like we were so connected and nothing could break us. We’ve been through a lot on our own, as a team. So we feel like nothing that life or basketball can throw at us would ever break us and make us separate.” Bueckers finished with 17 points and 6 rebounds in the win. ...read more read less