EmailPrintOpen Extended ReactionsAzzi Fudd is well aware that anyone who sees her family cheering in the stands at a UConn women's basketball game probably has some variation on the same thought:Wait, they're related? "I mean, all of us look like we come from a different family," Azzi said on campus earlier this winter, smiling as she ticked off the realities: Her mother, Katie, is red-haired and white. Her adoptive father, Tim, is a tall Black man. Her brothers, Jon and Jose, who were once foster children of Tim's mother, trace their roots to Guatemala and have brown skin."But," Azzi said without hesitation, "that's something I love about the way we look."Does it matter that the Fudds are a family stitched together not by blood, but -- very proudly -- by choice? How could it? They've shared bedrooms and clothes and meals and so, so, so many car rides. They've called each other before big games, like the Final Four, and big moments, like a surgery. They have nicknames for each other. They make fun of each other. They laugh at each other and, more often, with each other.When Azzi was little all she wanted, she said, was a brother or sister. Every Christmas, every birthday, the request was the same. She even stashed away pennies and nickels. "I was saving money to buy a baby," she said.Turned out, she got two siblings "and they changed my life," she said. "What a gift."In a series of interviews ahead of Azzi's last March Madness, before she tied her career high with 34 points and eight 3-pointers in her finale at Gampel Pavilion, the five Fudds shared their memories and their stories -- about the unusual circumstances that brought them all together, yes, but also about how, in the ways that are truly meaningful, their family might just be the epitome of what anyone could want from those who love them most."We are," Azzi said, "imperfectly perfect."Katie Smrcka-Duffy, a single mom, married Tim Fudd when Azzi was a toddler. Tim adopted Azzi as quickly as he could. Tim's mother, Georgia Hecker, frequently fostered kids at her home outside Atlanta, so Azzi first knew of her brothers as something more like cousins (or, technically, uncles). They were a couple of boys she would visit sometimes at Christmas, as she did in 2010. Azzi: I remember I got my first American Girl doll. Felicity -- a redhead, just like my mom -- so it was perfect. It snowed a little. I think it was [Jon and Jose's] first time seeing snow. So we built this really sad snowman in the front yard.Katie: They were just the personalities that they have now. Jose, just a goofball, you know, kind of a little class clown, always wanted to make people laugh and smile. He's a pleaser. And Jon was very much just about his business and didn't really care if you liked him or not. He was just going to do what he was going to do.Jose: There's pictures of us with Azzi in the snow. We're rolling around with the new trucks we just got. They were family to us.Katie: We went to the mall, went to the American Girl doll store. It was the boys' first experience at a mall. So Azzi had a doll. She got the boys a doll to borrow. And it was just one of those moments where the three of them were hanging out, playing with their dolls and eating a big old banana split. And not really realizing that was the last Christmas that everyone would be together with Tim's mom there.On Oct. 7, 2011, Tim's mother died at 63 after a short battle with lung cancer. "That hurt me more for them," Tim said. "I was older and I had my mom for a long time, and I knew that they needed her." Tim told Jon and Jose what happened after picking them up from school. Georgia had been very clear about what she wanted to happen to the boys, so after Tim and Katie successfully navigated the complexities of the foster system, Jon and Jose moved into the Fudds' small apartment in Virginia. Azzi was 8; Jon was 7; Jose was 5. Jose: We were those new foster kids. We were Hispanic, too, so we didn't look anything like them. You know, going through the foster system, some kids develop very quickly the ability to fight for themselves, fend for themselves. That reassurance that I didn't have to fight anymore -- it took so much pressure off.Jon: It was just two bedrooms. That's it. I think Azzi had her own bedroom before we moved in. So we all shared a room and we were all on one bunk bed, where me and Jose shared the bottom and Azzi slept on the top.Tim: She shared her stuff with them. She shared a room. She shared her entire life with them.Jose: I mean, it was a trap because, you know, she always used that to her leverage. "Hey, if you're gonna sleep in my room, you gotta dress up and sing with us," and stuff like that. Katie: She really wanted a sister, which is probably why she dressed them the way she did.Azzi: I would dress them up. I'd do their makeup. I put them in dresses, in a coconut bra and a grass skirt, in, like, literally anything. They never said no to me. They couldn't say no to me, being the older sister.Jon: She's very fun, very engaging. Sometimes annoying.Azzi: It definitely was a lot all at once, but it was amazing. And of course, we had our moments, we fought and whatever, but I was so happy.Katie: I think they brought a lot of good out of her in terms of learning how to talk a little trash or learning how to not necessarily be so nice.Tim: She's a super sweet kid. And now, all of a sudden, you have siblings who go in and take your stuff or use your stuff or move your stuff, and you have to deal with that.Jose: Azzi used to wake up to the same Beyonc song at like 6 in the morning. Every. Single. Morning. And it was so loud, and it was just Beyonc screaming at the top of her lungs at the beginning of the song. And I was like, "I'm done. When are we moving out?" I don't think I could listen to Beyonc for a couple of years after that.With all three kids playing basketball (among other sports), plus the packed schedules of Tim and Katie, who are both former high-level players who became coaches, Azzi and her brothers spent countless hours in the car together going from one gym to another. These rides accelerated their connection, to be sure, but also allowed for some ... vulnerable moments. Jon: We would sometimes play games, we would sometimes watch a movie on my sister's iPad when we were younger and sometimes we would just be knocked out sleeping.Azzi: We were a road-warrior family. We drove everywhere. I would make Jose sit in the middle.Jose: We played "punch buggy, no punch backs." We used to play Apple-Banana, which first of all, I don't know how you cheat in that game, but my parents still found a way to cheat. "That was a green car." "No, it wasn't. That's teal." Then for like the next half an hour, it's just them complaining about what car color it was.Katie: We had fun with each other.Jose: One time, my mom came and picked us up, and she's like, "You guys worked hard today. Do you want a snack?" And we were like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah," and she pulls out these cookies and she hands one to each of us. And they're shaped like Oreos. And we were like, "Mm, these are really good!" And my mom said, "Guys I have something to tell you: They're dog food."And Azzi's literally in mid-chew and she just starts crying. Like, bawling. "Why would you do this? Why?" And me and Jon are in the back like: "Can we get more?" [pantomimes a dog panting frantically]. We didn't really care. They were good.Basketball was the Fudd family's engine, and Azzi's talent was clear almost immediately. By the time she was in middle school, Jon remembers strangers already asking him about where she might play in college. Azzi's commitment to practicing every day was critical to her rise, and her brothers played important -- if occasionally adversarial -- roles in developing her game. Tim: They would rebound and pass [for her], which was huge because it took a lot of burden off of me and Katie.Katie: We didn't have a shooting machine. They were the shooting machine.Jose: "Babysitter" was not in our vocabulary. Our babysitter was the basketball. Me and Jon used to fight all the time about who would rebound and who would pass. But then at a certain point, I became the primary passer. Jon was the primary rebounder.Jon: I became a professional rebounder.Azzi: Basketball definitely was a way for us to bond. Like, good bonding and bad bonding. I don't know if they told you, but there were some balls thrown at people at times.Jon: If I didn't go fast enough after the rebounds and she was trying to rush me, then I would just get mad at her. I would chuck the ball at her head and then she would throw the ball at my face sometimes.Jose: Azzi used to be a little over the top. We were like, "You need to chill." She'd be like, "Bro, stop." And then out of nowhere, we're just throwing basketballs at each other.Azzi: I will admit I would be the one throwing balls at them. OK, usually I was the one throwing balls. But there were no injuries. Definitely tears, at times -- not mine, definitely theirs. But it's my job as the older sister to toughen them up. Someone's got to do it.Katie: We had a thing where if she missed two shots in a row, she'd have to do five pushups. And then she'd be like, all right, you guys do it too. So I'd look over and they're all doing pushups. "We're not even shooting. Why are we doing push-ups?" But, it was all just to get stronger and get better.Jon: The whole family got credit for helping her game grow. It made me feel great.Jose: Us being in the same bedroom, it created a bond. Us being on road trips created a bond. And then I think this was the very final piece. Being in the gym, being able to laugh and pass and shoot -- it was the very least last piece that just brought us so much closer before she went off to high school and to college and living her own life.In a household where, say, critiques of one's shooting form or discussions about how closely one cut around a pick were common, Tim and Katie felt it was important to make an attempt at boundaries. Tim and Azzi developed a delineation -- going for ice cream after basketball was always the place where "coach" disappeared and "dad" emerged. "I wanted to make sure that Basketball Azzi and Basketball Dad stayed where they stay," Tim said. "They're in the gym." Everyone admitted that sometimes (often, even) those lines might blur, but the sentiment behind it was critical and it was the same with Jon and Jose. Basketball might have been a big piece of their relationship with Azzi, but there was something more meaningful behind it that crystalized as they grew together. Azzi: The boys brought this entertainment -- like, the dinner conversations. Everything was laughing, fun, light. I just wish I had their confidence. I've always loved that about them, especially Jon.Jon: We're all different, but I'm more different than anyone else. I like sports, but I don't really engage a lot -- I have a different environment going. Basically it's a passion for creativity in general.Azzi: We'd go to high school games, and at halftime they'll play music -- the teams leave, there's no cheerleaders or anything. We could convince him to go out on the court and dance. And people would cheer for him! Me and Jose, we couldn't really do that. But he could be the center of attention and do his thing. Katie: We have a lot of jokes in the house about how everybody looks, but it's the family. It's what we know. I wouldn't look at us and say we don't belong, because to me, we fit together perfectly. But I do think it is funny sometimes how others see it.Jose: Middle school, I would say, is where it started to come up. "How are you related to her?" Stuff like that. "How's your mom white and your dad's Black and you're brown?"Jon: Some people would just start speaking Spanish [to us] at first. But we would not be able to understand them because our native language is English.Tim: We've all been through stuff. We've all had stuff happen to us, whether it's been with our birth families or whatever it is and biological family members. We get it.Azzi: There were definitely questions when they're like, "OK, so how are you related? They look Hispanic, but you don't." Sometimes I'll be like, "Oh, yeah, they're adopted. They're half Guatemalan. I'm not. I'm half Black." Maybe it's not the ideal way to gain two siblings but I think there's a lot of beauty in that.Azzi has torn her ACL twice: once after her sophomore season in high school and again during her junior year at UConn. Both injuries were demoralizing, and they forced Azzi to grind through long, painful recoveries in which she leaned hard on her family -- particularly her brothers -- to help her through. It's almost impossible, she said, to imagine now how she would have handled those challenges as an only child. Azzi: So in high school, my room was in the basement, and I couldn't go up and down the stairs, so I was moved to the guest room upstairs, and it was everything I needed. Jose was like, "What can I help you with? Can I fill the tub with ice? Can I do this?" He would come in and watch movies with me.Jose: She was very limited. She couldn't even bend her leg. There was one point where she just couldn't walk at all. She was just bed rotting.Tim: We were going to support her in any way possible, but they kind of normalized the situation a little bit. Azzi: If I needed a snack, Jon would make my ice cream bowl.Jon: Sometimes I think it would be vanilla, sometimes I think it would be butter pecan. But I think it was mostly rocky road.Azzi: He was always offering things to me. Like, you're in high school, you want to hang out with your friends, you want to go to parties, go to sporting games. But they would just spend their time with me. I'm not gonna say I cried because I know they're gonna see this, but I really felt loved.Katie: It just made it where it wasn't like you weren't able to wallow in your sadness because there's other stuff going on.Azzi: I actually have a text [from 2023, after the second ACL tear]. I saw it the other day because I'd screenshotted it, and Jose had texted me and was like, "You hurt your knee? Why would you do that?" Like, that was the message he sent. "Why would you do that?" And I'm like, "Really? Really?"Jose: She doesn't want to admit it -- that I'm the funniest child out of all them. I was just like, "Bro, why would you do that?" But then I was like, "I'm so sorry."Katie: I think the second ACL, she knew she could come back from it. It wasn't the unknown of "Can I make it back?" It was, "I made it back once, I can make it back again."Jose: The moment that made me feel like she knew I support her was when she got surgery [in Connecticut for the second tear]. It was 6 in the morning, and I was up walking our dogs, and I get a FaceTime from her. And she said, "I just wanted to call someone before I went in, and I figured, you'd be the person I'd call."Azzi did make it back -- in a big way -- following her second knee injury. During the 2024-25 season, she helped lead the Huskies to the school's 12th national title, earning the Most Outstanding Player award at the Final Four. It was everything she'd ever wanted on the court. In the middle of that run, though, one of the most meaningful moments for the Fudd family actually came far away from the UConn spotlight: On March 14, 2025, days before UConn opened its tournament, Azzi bolted out of UConn's facility, zipped 40 miles down the highway and joined the rest of her family in the stands at Wesleyan University to watch Jose and his teammates from the University of Mary Washington play in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Division III men's basketball tournament. Jose: I remember thinking, like, "Gosh, if I win a national championship, me and Azzi, we could be right next to each other."Azzi: I don't control my schedule at that point. We had practice. I remember Paige [Bueckers] went with me, and it was one of those things where it's like, "I don't know if we're gonna make it."Katie: Unfortunately, UConn had an afternoon practice, but Azzi was like, "I don't care if it's 45 minutes away." If she could only make half the game, she was making half. She was getting there.Jose: I think it was the most nervous I've ever been in my life. And then I see Azzi and Paige walk in, and I'm like, "All right." Seeing Azzi is comfort. Like, I feel safe playing in front of you.Tim: I imagine my mom was looking down and saying, "I knew you could do this. I knew you had it in you." I think she would be super proud of what we've done and what we've built as a family.Jose: I actually ended up playing decently. We weren't ready to go home, but sadly we lost by [two] points.Azzi: I was so proud of him. Just to be able to see him and show up and support him at least once -- I was so happy I got to do that. To see him out on that court and to finally meet his teammates after hearing about them for so long, it was such a proud big sister moment.Throughout Azzi's last UConn season, the Fudds have been a constant presence in Storrs. Katie and Tim are at every game. Jon is a junior at Mitchell College, only about an hour away in New London, Connecticut, so he has been a regular too, while Jose has come up from Virginia as often as possible. Everyone knows that life's next phase will be very, very different. Azzi is headed to the WNBA. Jon is interested in pursuing work in either the film industry or possibly public relations. Jose is studying to become an HVAC technician back in Virginia. So as this season winds down -- Azzi is averaging 17.8 points per game and pushed the Huskies into the Sweet 16 for the 32nd consecutive time -- the Fudds are reveling, as much as they can, in a familiar closeness that has meant so much since their family was completed nearly 15 years ago.Tim: We were at a game and Jose was there and he's screaming silly stuff to her, which no one ever does, especially in the UConn environment. He's screaming stuff like, "She can't guard you! She can't guard you!" over and over, and Azzi is looking at him and laughing in the middle of the game. Then when she comes out of the game, she's like, "You guys are idiots," but she was loving it.Jose: Seeing this now, like, her being aggressive and just playing her game -- I'm just proud. I have no other words. She's playing the basketball that she wants to play, how she wants to play it.Katie: She's confident, she's happy, she's playing with joy. I think as a parent, all I can say is I feel peace.Tim: I have millions of [nicknames] for her. We all call her Aiz. She's "Booty Two," which is short for "Booty Two Shoes," I don't know where that came from. It's something I made up. And then she's Boots. That was when she was little. She loved Dora the Explorer, and she was Boots. She became my Boots. So, I do have nicknames I could call out to her [when she's playing] and she would know it's me.Azzi: It warms my heart. To see my parents, my grandparents, Jon, Jose and the whole squad is there, it's like, I'm so fortunate, I'm so blessed, I'm so loved. And I always try to make sure I notice that.Jose: Sometimes it sucked while she had those injuries just to see her sit on the bench a lot. But she overcame challenges to get back to where she is and be better than she was before the injuries. It's very fun to see her on the court and scoring so much.Katie: It's been a long journey. We're going through mountains and valleys and all sorts of places. But we know it's not over yet.Azzi: I think we're a perfect mix of chaos and unfilteredness and, like, just realness. The good, the bad, the ugly, the funny. The stuff that shouldn't be said, the stuff that is said. ... Anyways, that is the Fudd family. And I wouldn't want it any other way.
