Perhaps the best highlight of freshman Blanca Quinonez’s debut with the UConn women’s basketball team in Monday’s exhibition game didn’t even show up in the box score.

Early in the third quarter, Quinonez saw a skip pass coming from sophomore Kayleigh Heckel as she cut towards the top of the arc. The ball flew towards her a few inches too high, slightly behind her momentum in a spot where most would’ve tried to simply catch it and recalibrate — or fumbled it out of bounds.

Quinonez instead leaped, flicking a touch pass in mid-air to sophomore forward Sarah Strong standing in the paint. Strong immediately had a clear lane to kick it out to redshirt senior Azzi Fudd in the corner, who cashed a 3-pointer that put the Huskies ahead of Boston College by 18 points.

It was an unusually smart play for a freshman, a split-second decision that showed impressive court vision and grace under pressure in her first-ever college game.

But Quinonez isn’t a typical freshman.

“She’s fun to watch because she’s unpredictable,” coach Geno Auriemma said after the team’s first day of official practice. “She does some things every day where you really go, only somebody that’s played against really experienced players knows that.”

It’s no surprise that the 6-foot-2 forward is mature beyond her years, on and off the court. Born and raised in Ecuador, Quinonez moved halfway across the world at 13 years old to pursue elite basketball and attend high school in Italy after she received an offer to play professionally for Magnolia Campobasso in the Serie A1 league. Her parents were hesitant to send their daughter more than 6,000 miles away from home by herself, but Quinonez now says it was the best decision they could have made.

“The decision was really hard, because I was really young. My mom and dad didn’t want to leave me,” Quinonez said. “It was hard, but I’d say that it was fun, because they really gave me all of the things that I needed to grow up, to get better every day and to make this decision to be here at UConn.”

In Italy, Quinonez had to get comfortable quickly in a world full of unknowns. She was learning a brand new culture and attending school in a language she didn’t speak, all while adjusting to a completely different caliber of basketball. When she made her first game appearance in 2020, she was often competing against grown women, many more than a decade her senior. Playing the European style meant absorbing a complex playbook because of its reliance on halfcourt sets.

But even once she began excelling overseas, Quinonez never considered playing in the NCAA until 2024, when she started following March Madness and recognized that the American college system could be a valuable step towards unlocking the highest level of her game. When UConn called, Campobasso player development coach Alessandra Formica wasn’t surprised, and Quinonez’s mind was made up before she ever set foot in Storrs.

“She’s been one of the best European players in the last few years, so I was sure that big schools would be interested in her,” Formica said. “I was only surprised that she committed so quick, because I knew that she had different offers, but when you feel like something is right for you, you just do it.”

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Formica is a former player for the Italian national team and worked as a skills coach with the Dallas Mavericks for four years before joining the staff at Campbasso in 2024. She immediately realized Quinonez was special with her unique combination of size and natural athleticism, which gives her the ability to play and guard multiple positions at an elite level. But Formica said her best trait is her coachability.

“Since she was young, she’s had this professional mindset,” Formica said. “She really tries to understand what you’re telling her. It’s not like ‘Do this’ and that’s it. She tries to understand actually why we’re doing this, and that’s the basketball IQ part that I believe helps her translate things into the game.”

Though the Serie A1 season ended in April, Quinonez had to miss UConn’s summer session workouts in June to finish her high school graduation requirements in Italy, so she spent the summer training one-on-one with Formica. Formica knew that Quinonez needed to diversify her scoring ability, so most of her workouts focused on developing her 3-point and mid-range shooting. They also worked on adding more finesse change-of-pace skills to her repertoire, because Quinonez will run into players in college who she can’t beat on strength and speed alone.

Quinonez embraced it all. If you didn’t know better, Formica said no one watching her practice would guess she’s only a teenager.

“She makes you go to the gym and do better,” Formica said. “As a coach I was always like, when I’m working out with Blanca, I’ve got to be ready. I have to step my game up too. The fact that she was challenging me, I loved it … You expect someone like her to be a little cocky, but she always leads by example. She was the first one in the gym, the last one to leave, always putting in extra shots. Everybody wanted to be around Blanca.”

At UConn, Quinonez is once again handling a difficult transition with remarkable poise for a player her age. Before arriving in Storrs to begin her first semester, she had only visited the U.S. once when she participated in the NBA’s Basketball Without Borders camp in Phoenix in July 2024.

English is still a major challenge for the freshman, but that hasn’t stopped her from fitting in seamlessly with her new teammates. Fudd said Quinonez has a sneaky sense of humor beneath her more introverted exterior.

“She just has some comments … where it’s like, how do you know that? How do you know how to use that slang?” Fudd said with a laugh. “I feel like I have extra respect for (international players) knowing that they’re so far from home, speaking their second, third, sometimes fourth language … Seeing her show up every day and be a great player, a great teammate, having great energy, seeing that smile on her face, it’s incredible.”

Quinonez’s on-court adjustment has also come with growing pains, but Auriemma isn’t concerned about mistakes this early on. She finished 2-for-8 from the field with five turnovers in the Huskies’ scrimmage against Boston College, but she also logged four assists, two steals and a block in less than 20 minutes on the floor. Even if the production isn’t there yet, her potential is already apparent.

“I did tell her that she leads the free world in turnovers,” Auriemma joked postgame. “She tries to do a lot of things, and in the beginning that’s okay, because she’s out there trying to impact the game … She’ll throw some passes that no one else can throw — there were a couple of them today — and then she’ll throw a couple passes no one else should ever throw. So she’s an adventure.”

But for Quinonez, the biggest struggle has nothing to do with basketball: The pasta in Connecticut simply can’t compare to what she got used to in Italy.

“I think I miss that (the most),” Quinonez said, grinning. “But the kitchen is doing their best work to make me feel close to Italy too, so it’s not bad.”