For 2 1/2 years, Caroline Ducharme was lost. Separated from basketball, though not her UConn teammates, feeling healthy and fit for one day, or part of a day, and then terrible in the next moment.

“I would have a good day, a good game, a good stretch,” Ducharme said. “And I would have this newfound hope that it’s over, I’m back, I’m feeling like myself again. But then something would happen. So I would often find myself not even able to enjoy when I was feeling good, or playing good, because I was just waiting for the next shoe to fall. ‘This is going to last until I get hit again or have my next migraine.'”

She thought it was a headache, and she could play with it. As a basketball player, it was inevitable that Ducharme would get hit again, or fall, or fly on a plane and be jostled about, but any such occurrence would send her back to square one. She was a top-rated recruit and had a promising freshman season at UConn, but Ducharme came to wonder if she would ever feel right again, let alone be able to play basketball, when she stepped away in January 2024.

On April 15, 2024, Ducharme and her family moved to Central Florida to begin treatment at the Aviv Clinics, one of only a handful of places in the United States offering its type of holistic, customized program for persistent concussion symptoms.

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“They had done scans we had never seen before, testing we had never done before,” said Todd Ducharme, Caroline’s father. “When we got those results, and Caroline saw the scans, saw there was noticeable frontal and temporal lobe impairment, it was like, ‘okay, I’m not just making this up. I have to do something about this.'”

Ten weeks later, Ducharme walked to a gym across the street and began shooting. After 45 minutes, she had made 84 of 100 3-point shots and walked off feeling like her old self again.

“She was smiling again,” her mother, Chrissy Ducharme said. “She was laughing, she was silly, she was her goofy self, stuff we hadn’t seen for so long. To get that glimmer of hope, it was incredible.”

Ducharme, 22, made it back on the court for short spans during the Huskies’ recent national championship run, and announced her intention to return next year in hopes of picking up where she left off before post concussion symptoms put her basketball aspirations in jeopardy. Caroline and her family are sharing her story in the hope that others will take concussions seriously and explore all avenues toward recovery.

“It was a hard process,” said Dr. Amir Hadanny, chief medical officer and head of research at Aviv Clinics. “But she gave it her all. She is a warrior.”

The first blow

The Huskies had been hit hard by injuries in 2021-22, and coach Geno Auriemma turned to Ducharme, a freshman, a McDonald’s All-American from Milton, Mass. She scored 20 points in a loss to Louisville on Dec. 19, 2021 and was off and running. On Jan. 26 at DePaul, she took hard shot in the nose, but scored 19 and hit the winning basket with one second left.

“The initial impact shook me up but I think with the adrenaline of the game and I didn’t realize how hard I was hit, I was able to keep playing,” she said. “It didn’t really hit me until late that night, or early the next morning, but the headache kept getting worse, kept getting worse.”

Ducharme went through the concussion protocol, but was still suffering from headaches and migraines. She tried to play through it, but Auriemma could tell when she wasn’t herself, and take her out of the games. It seemed like every time she was out there, she’d take a hit that affected her and, with her original brain injury not healed, each hit was making her symptoms worse. Ducharme played sparing minutes during the NCAA Tournament that season.

UConn’s Paige Bueckers stands with UConn’s Caroline Ducharme. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill)

“We know Caroline and we know she is going to do whatever she has to do be there for her teammates and play,” Todd Ducharme said. “And fight through whatever she was dealing with. … That’s what scared us the most.”

A ‘brave face’ for the public

Ducharme put in a strong offseason of training and treatment, staying at UConn throughout, and returned for her sophomore year with optimism. Paige Bueckers was out for the 2022-23 season with a torn ACL, and again Ducharme was one of the players who could pick up minutes and points.

In the fourth game of the season, she played 24 minutes and scored 15 points in a victory over Iowa in Portland, Ore. But again there were fits and starts, though she played fairly regular minutes. There were times, at home, when her parents would see her curling up on a couch, her energetic, playful self becoming a memory.

“She would put on a brave face for the public,” said Chrissy Ducharme, her mother. “But we knew how she had been struggling. … She’d be feeling good, and then the next day, she’s throwing up, she’s in a dark room, she couldn’t talk.”

Ducharme’s junior season again started with optimism that her problems were behind her, and she scored 10 points in 20 minutes in the season-opener against Dayton.

“I was hit again (during UConn’s summer trip) in Europe,” she said. “I felt good when we came back, I was as close to my old self as I had been in a long time.”

Then the symptoms crept back yet again. She took another hit in a game at Minnesota on Nov. 19, 2023 “and it affected me more than it should have because of where I was,” she said.

It would be 15 months before she would enter a game again. Her symptoms were exacerbated during a turbulent flight to the Cayman Islands for the Huskies’ two games there. “And that was the moment where I was just like, ‘I’m going on two years of this,” Ducharme said. “I had felt so good, to feel so terrible. It was such a drastic shift.”

Stepping away

After several weeks on the sidelines, Ducharme decided to shut it down for the season.

“For me to be the one to say I need to step away, that’s when I knew it was bad and I needed actual help,” she said. “I needed someone to intervene.”

Todd and Chrissy Ducharme were determined to “scour the earth” for the best doctors they could find. Finally, a well-known neurologist and neurosurgeon, Joseph Maroon, recommended the Aviv Clinics in The Villages, Fla., between Orlando and Gainesville.

“The folks at UConn did everything the way were supposed to,” Todd said. “They followed all he protocols, all the treatments. You name it, Caroline tried it. We needed something different.”

At the Aviv facility, scans showed the source of the Ducharme’s persistent symptoms.

“What was very, very unique in Caroline’s case was she’d had multiple concussions,” Hadanny said. “Each one of them has caused exacerbation of the symptoms. That made it a chronic or persistent post-concussion syndrome. When it’s becoming chronic or persistent, more than three or six months, we are talking about a constant wound in the brain, a metabolic dysfunction of several areas of the brain. If nothing gets you out of it, you will be stuck in that well of chronic symptoms.”

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The approach was to treat the the source, and not just the symptoms.

“Yes, it can be reversed, yes, it can be cured,” Hadanny said. “In order to do that, we’re using the same concept of wound-healing, with a hyperbaric, oxygen-therapy program. The whole concept is to recover and regenerate that area and reverse that metabolism. What usually is being done for post-concussion syndrome is targeting the symptoms. ‘Oh, you have migraines, take an anti-migraine medication, you have depression, take an anti-depression pill.’ No, we’re going for the source, healing the brain injury and by healing that, we are improving the symptoms eventually.”

The clinic has several hyperbaric chambers and a team of neurologists, cognitive therapists, sports psychologists, athletic trainers, strength and conditioning coaches were to meet every day to plan each step. “They never promised anything, but we talked to enough people to know this was our best chance,” Todd Ducharme said.

“I knew it was something new, different that I hadn’t tried,” Caroline said. “It’s not your average rehab facility. I knew this was going to be something extreme, or else I wouldn’t have gone down there.”

UConn staff and Aviv staff stayed in communication, coaches came down to check on her, to make sure the treatment and protocols would be consistent when she returned to campus. Paige Bueckers came to Florida to spend a few days with her, usually just sitting in their room, watching movies.

Caroline questioned whether she would make it back to basketball, and her family was not even thinking about that, but after that shooting session in late June, everything changed.

“I had some hope,” she said.

This isn’t the goal

Ducharme was encouraged, but there was a long way to go. “My goal wasn’t to shoot in an empty gym,” she said.

She returned to UConn and continued with the program, gradually improving, gradually doing more in practice without reverting back, shooting well in practice. One day, she excitedly called her parents and said, “I got elbowed in the face — and I’m Okay.”

UConn’s Sarah Strong, left, and Caroline Ducharme, right, celebrate during a parade in honor of the Huskies’ NCAA women’s college basketball championship in Hartford. (AP Photo/Jessica Hill)

Late in the season, during a Zoom call with about 20 participants from UConn and Aviv, Caroline was finally cleared to play. She could have taken a redshirt year and preserved the eligibility, but after more than two years of symptoms, 15 months since she’d been in a game, she needed to see how she’d feel.

On Feb. 22, 2025, the Huskies were leading Butler 84-47 with 2:03 to play at Hinkle Fieldhouse in Indianapolis when Auriemma turned to her on the bench and asked, “you want to play?”

“It was the end of the year, but knowing that I could do it,” Ducharme said, “that I was healthy enough to check into a game, it was an amazing feeling. There were a lot of emotions. I was definitely nervous. My teammates were the ones who made sure I knew how amazing it was, how special it was. It’s a couple of minutes, it’s nothing crazy, and they said, ‘you could have literally never done this again. You weren’t even thinking about this last year.’ I wouldn’t even pack my sneakers.”

Her medical team in Florida, meanwhile, was watching, cheering, texting back and forth as Ducharme played, and appeared in eight more games games, including the final minutes of the national championship game April 6. By then, she had announced her plans to return to UConn for a fifth year.

“I know her goal is to play like she played her freshman year and get drafted (by the WNBA),” Todd Ducharme said. “We always say, ‘don’t ever count this kid out.'”

Said Hadanny: “I would say right now she is 75-80 percent recovered. She still has a little way to go. She was able to play several minutes, which was a big step. I would say she should return to more than 95 percent of where she was, a complete cure is definitely possible. We want to see her compete next year at the level she was.”

During the Final Four, Bueckers was asked which of her teammates she thought would be a coach some day and, after a few seconds, named Ducharme. “She has that in her,” her mother agreed.

But coaching can wait. Caroline Ducharme has some catching up to do on the court, a few last lines to write.

“Where I am now is not the end goal,” she said. “But it is a good first step, just to prove to myself I can come back. This isn’t the end of my story.”

Originally Published: May 7, 2025 at 6:00 AM EDT