This former UConn women’s star answered a call and in 24 hours was playing in her first pro game

NEW YORK — The morning of her WNBA debut, Aubrey Griffin‘s mom unearthed a decade-old photo of the former UConn women’s basketball standout attending her first New York Liberty game at 16 years old.

Griffin grew up just a few miles north of New York City in Ossining, and having the Liberty nearby helped foster her aspirations to compete on the professional level from an early age. On Friday night, Griffin got to fulfill that childhood dream with her hometown team when she stepped on the court at Barclays Center in a Liberty jersey for her first appearance in a WNBA game.

“It means a lot, this whole thing. I’m just grateful for the opportunity, grateful to be here and be given the chance to play out there,” Griffin said Friday. “I’ve had to fight through a lot of adversity in the past year … I just missed being out there and playing ball. Like, I love it, so I was just happy to be out there.”

Griffin scored her first professional points late in the fourth quarter of New York’s 106-75 win over the Connecticut Sun, driving smoothly past Sun forward Aneesah Morrow for a layup. Though she played just five minutes, simply being on the court was a remarkable accomplishment for the former UConn forward.

Griffin’s path to her first WNBA game was anything but linear. The 6-foot-1 forward signed with the Huskies as a top-25 recruit in the Class of 2019 but spent six years in college due to a pair of major injuries. She redshirted the 2021-22 season after undergoing surgery to repair a disc injury in her back, then tore her left ACL midway through 2023-24.

The ACL tear sidelined Griffin until January 2025, and she was never fully healthy during her final college season, averaging just 11.3 minutes on the court in 16 games. The Minnesota Lynx took a chance on Griffin in the 2025 WNBA Draft, selecting her in the third round, but she didn’t report to training camp because of lingering issues with her left knee. She had arthroscopic knee surgery last April and spent most of the past year rehabbing, traveling between Minnesota, New York and Connecticut to train and get treatments.