After awful concussions, UConn’s Caroline Ducharme used a Florida clinic to find her way back to the court

When Caroline Ducharme thinks about the hardest moments in her life, it all often goes back to a period of about two years where she had to grapple with the debilitating symptoms from several concussions.

There were days where she couldn’t get out of bed. She thinks about the times where someone would be talking to her and she would be struggling to listen, to comprehend, to process, to follow the conversation. And the lowest points were when Ducharme dealt with self-doubt and uncertainty about her future.

Ducharme was ranked as the fifth best women’s college basketball recruit in the country in her 2021 high school class by ESPN — ahead of stars and WNBA Draft picks like Olivia Miles, Sonia Citron and Aziaha James. She was a McDonald’s All-American and now plays for the most iconic program in the sport, the UConn Huskies, which are shepherded by the game’s winningest coach, Geno Auriemma.

Basketball is in her DNA. It is an essential part of her identity. And during this time of crisis, she started to think about a life without the sport.

“For so long, I defined myself as a basketball player. I’m proud of that,” Ducharme told SB Nation. “A lot of people say you should diversify. You know, don’t put yourself in a box. But I like being a basketball player.”

“She likes that box,” her father Todd says. “She’s very comfortable there.”

“That’s kind of what I’ve always thought of myself, what I always thought my future would be, how my life would play out,” Caroline adds. “The uncertainty of it all, when I didn’t know what I was doing or what would come of it, if I would ever get back (to playing basketball), that was probably the hardest part of it.”

Concussions threatened to rob Ducharme of her identity. They kept her away from the sport she loves. She wasn’t herself. She tried to play through it all, and then ultimately forced herself to step away from the game and search for answers.

Eventually, she found help at the Aviv Clinics in The Villages, Florida, which is home to a hyperbaric treatment center. The clinic specializes in holistic hyperbaric therapy and treats patients suffering from head trauma, strokes and other brain injuries. It is the only clinic of its kind in the United States and only one of three on Earth.

When Aviv Clinics began, it was initially intended to treat people who suffered from cognitive decline from aging. But more recently, the clinic has been able to help young athletes recover from concussions and treat the symptoms associated with them.

“Basketball is a contact sport. You will get hit in the head, for sure, whether it’s the ball or someone’s elbow,” Dr. Mohammed Elamir, the lead physician at Aviv Clinics, told SB Nation. “Symptom wise, Caroline really checked off a lot of boxes for post concussion syndrome. Her scans definitely showed areas of decreased metabolism that are very common in head injuries, no matter the sport.”

While the greater sports-watching public doesn’t typically associate concussions with basketball the way they might with football, data from a 2024 CDC study identified girls basketball as eighth among youth sports with the highest rates of concussions — ahead of boys soccer. Additionally, the study showed that women have a higher chance for a sports-related concussion than men in sports that use the same rules, like soccer and basketball. Moreover, concussion symptoms that impact mental health are more common in girls.

Ducharme spent three months at Aviv Clinics in 2024. About a year after she first arrived at the Florida clinic, she was about 76 miles south in Tampa. She had just played two minutes in the national championship game, had climbed a ladder to cut down the net and was celebrating with her teammates, coaches and family. She looked to her parents in the stands, tears coming down her face.

“When the buzzer went off, just thinking back to where I was last year, I probably wouldn’t have been able to sit in that arena. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to put a uniform on and sub in like I did,” Caroline says. “I was not in a good place mentally, just not knowing what my future was going to be… It was definitely surreal to finally be in that moment and think about all the hard work that I’ve done.”

The treatment she received at Aviv Clinics returned Ducharme to basketball. She had her life and identity back. She was part of a national championship team and is now in the midst of an offseason, preparing for a bigger role in her final season with the Huskies.

“Of all the treatments she’s done — and believe me, she’s tried them all — that whole sort of holistic approach had the most impact on her than anything she’s ever done,” Todd told SB Nation. “We actually got our daughter back — the old Caroline back.”

But the road to this relief and happiness was far from easy for the Ducharmes.

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Caroline Ducharme isn’t sure how many concussions she’s suffered.

“Honestly, I don’t know the exact number. It’s a lot,” Ducharme said. “It’s the million-dollar question. They were all basketball-related, in a practice or game.”

The first significant hit to the head that Ducharme endured was on Jan. 26, 2022, during an 80-78 win at DePaul amidst her standout freshman season. In the first quarter of that game while battling for a ball in the air, a DePaul player inadvertently elbowed Ducharme across the bridge of her nose while trying to box her out. Ducharme immediately crumbled to the hardwood and could feel pain under her eyes. But she kept playing, 32 minutes in all, leading the Huskies in scoring with 19 points on 8-of-12 shooting in a narrow road victory. It was one of the several performances that helped Ducharme earn a spot on the All-Big East Team as a freshman.

But the morning after the DePaul game is when Ducharme experienced concussion symptoms for the first time, ailments that would continue to impact her, exacerbated by additional hits to the head.

Ducharme shrugged it off and kept playing. Exactly a week after the DePaul game, UConn was at Creighton and Ducharme was defending a Bluejay who was driving toward the rim for a layup. As her opponent went up for the shot, her elbow banged Ducharme just under her left eye. She fell to the floor and tumbled into the photographers stationed along the baseline, then made her way to UConn’s bench and buried her head into her hands. She was dizzy, couldn’t see straight and immediately felt a headache. Moments later, she vomited.

“That’s when it really got bad,” she says. “I remember not really knowing where I was. Honestly, I don’t really remember walking to the locker room. It was very blurry.”

Ducharme missed UConn’s next four games, but then played in every one all the way through the national title game, where the Huskies fell to South Carolina in Minneapolis. Just prior to the start of her sophomore season that fall, she took another hit to the head in practice and missed the season-opener. She returned to the rotation and started playing well again, scoring 15 points in a win over Iowa, then collecting 19 points and seven rebounds in a victory against Marquette.

Then she suffered another blow to the head in practice in early January of 2023, the fourth for Ducharme in less than a year. Symptoms returned, and among them were nausea, migraines, pain in her jaw, mood swings, a slowed reaction time, sensitivity to bright lights and loud sounds. She missed 13 games, then scored 10 points in her first game back — a home victory over Creighton.

In the Big East Tournament, she experienced her fifth hit to the head in a span of 14 months. Two more would come that August when UConn traveled to Croatia, Slovenia and Italy during a preseason summer tour of Europe where they played exhibition games against local teams. Ducharme played in UConn’s first four games that season, then says she got hit “lightly” in the head during the Huskies’ Nov. 19, 2023 win at Minnesota, just days before the team flew to the Cayman Islands to play against UCLA and Kansas. During that flight, many of Ducharme’s previous concussion symptoms came roaring back when the plane encountered some terrible turbulence.

“Flights were always bad, but that one was especially bad. At that point, I just couldn’t really do it anymore,” Ducharme said. “I was done… And deep down, I really didn’t know if I would be able to come back.”

After her eighth hit to the head in less than 22 months, she wasn’t sure if she would play basketball again and her parents felt helpless.

“That’s where it started to get scary,” her father Todd says. “That’s when it was like, we need to take a step back here and restart and see where we go from here.”

Ducharme wouldn’t play in another game for the rest of the 2023-24 season, which was supposed to be her natural junior year. She stopped going to games because her symptoms made it hard to sit on the bench amidst the lights and sounds of an arena. Even for most home games in Storrs, Connecticut, she’d watch them from her bedroom. Sometimes she could come out to the floor for warmups, but would watch the rest from the locker room.

Photo by M. Anthony Nesmith/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

Eventually, Caroline and her family made the decision to completely step away from playing basketball and focus on finding solutions. The Ducharmes called everybody.

Todd says they first heard of Aviv Clinics from Dr. Joe Maroon, who has worked with the NFL and WWE. Maroon made the introduction and then the Ducharmes had several phone calls with representatives from the clinic. One difficult hurdle, Todd says, was the cost, as the clinic’s treatments were not covered by their health insurance. They got an assist from the foundation of former MLS star Taylor Twellman, whose career was cut short by concussions. Think Taylor aims to create “social change in the world of traumatic brain injuries.” In addition to helping with the bill, Twellman spoke to Caroline about what he went through.

Dr. Mohammed Elamir got involved with Aviv Clinics in 2017 when his father, a neurologist, had a stroke. Elamir started researching ways to help him and through that came upon the work of Dr. Shai Efrati, who is now the Chair of Aviv’s Medical Advisory Board and whose work focuses on hyperbaric medicine and brain rehabilitation.

“We purposely chose The Villages because it’s the largest retirement community. There’s a lot of healthy agers, people who have cognitive decline from aging and want to improve. But of course, you’re going to have high rates of stroke and injury,” Elamir says. “But since we opened, we get athletes from all over the place with injuries, with concussions, and we have a saying: the brain doesn’t discriminate what hurts it. So, whether it’s a basketball player’s elbow, the floor or a Ford Explorer, it doesn’t matter. Injury to the brain is injury to the brain.”

Elamir says that retired NFL players were among some of his first patients at Aviv. More recently, current athletes like Ducharme have sought Aviv’s help too. Elamir says he’s treated athletes from the high school level through post-pro retirement. To all of them, he stresses that not all hyperbaric treatment is created equal. At-home zip-up sacks are not the same as medical-grade pressurized rooms with specific protocols, especially when dealing with brain injuries.

The first question Elamir asks during a complimentary consultation of potential patients is: “What are your goals if you do this treatment?”

For many of Aviv’s patients who are college or pro athletes like Ducharme, the objective is to get back to where they were physically and mentally before they suffered concussions.

“Then they go through an assessment process, which involves specialized brain scans, namely something called a SPECT scan,” Elamir says. “It’s a metabolic scan that sees the metabolic function of the brain, because often with post concussion syndrome, structurally, things are fine, but functionally they’re not. When you can see that dysfunction, that mismatch, that tells us, ‘Aha, there is the injury.’”

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Once the Ducharmes found Aviv and figured out how to pay for it, they then had to sell their daughter on it.

“In order to do this, it was almost convincing her — not that she didn’t want to get better, but every time she just thought, ‘Well, I can get through this. I’m fine if I just take a nap, or if I take my medication, I’ll be fine.’ And we’re like, ‘Honey, this is not an ankle. This is not an ACL. This is your brain,’” her mother Chrissy told SB Nation. “Seeing those scans for the first time was what really did it for her.”

Caroline admits that she was in a bit of denial. Seeing what her brain looked like shook her. She could see the dead stem cells. Doctors showed her which parts of her brain weren’t working.

There was alarm and anxiety at first for Caroline, but then some relief set in. Then a path forward began to form.

“It wasn’t just that I wasn’t tough enough to play through it. There was actually something physically wrong with me,” Caroline says. “I didn’t know how serious it was. And when you actually see it in front of you, and they’re showing you, it definitely kind of puts things in perspective. I can see it. It’s right there. I need to go and fix this.”

By April, the Ducharmes had settled on their plan. They would move to Florida so Caroline could get top-of-the-line treatment consistently. Five days a week, Caroline spent four to six hours during their 12-week stay in the Sunshine State at Aviv. She would spend hours in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber and also go through sessions of physical therapy, cognitive therapy and psychiatry.

Initially, the treatment was taxing and draining on Caroline. After a day at Aviv, she would return to the Ducharmes’ temporary home in Florida, collapse on the couch and snuggle with the family dog. Then she’d do it all over again the next day.

While Caroline returned home some days tired, she was making real progress. Folks from UConn came to visit her, including star guard Paige Bueckers and athletic trainer Janelle Francisco. Nika Muhl texted her often. While visiting with Ducharme and familiarizing herself with Aviv’s treatment, Francisco even went into the hyperbaric chamber with her and attended other appointments.

Elamir describes the environment of the hyperbaric chamber as sitting in a comfortable chair in a small pressurized room. Ducharme would breathe 100 percent oxygen through a mask for 20 minutes, take the mask off for five minutes, then put it back on for another 20. Back and forth, back and forth. She would do that for two hours per day, five days a week.

“We’re getting your oxygen level very high, which has its benefits, but more importantly, we’re getting you back to normal when you take the mask off,” Elamir explains. “And that fluctuation is what triggers the body to grow new cells into the brain, grow new blood vessels in the brain. And that’s really the secret sauce. That’s the protocol that actually gets stimulation and growth in the brain.”

While she was in the hyperbaric chamber, Ducharme would also use a custom-built iPad created for a high oxygen environment and complete brain exercises assigned to her by a neuropsychologist. Those games and tests are designed to trigger parts of her brain that were injured.

“As we’re growing new cells with the protocol, we want them to go to the area of injury, and we can help that process and kind of guide a little bit more when we’re triggering it with those specific brain exercises,” Elamir says.

Eventually, about two months into her treatment, she was able to rework basketball back into part of her daily routine too. Through her time at Aviv though, Caroline’s parents were careful to not ask her about the sport. They never wanted to pressure her. They just wanted her to feel like herself again.

But when Caroline was cleared to do some basketball-related activities, she and her dad went into a gym. After six months of not shooting a basketball, Caroline took 100 shots from behind the 3-point arc. She made 84 of them.

Finally, at dinner that night, Todd felt compelled to speak up: “You know, not for nothing, but that was kind of cool.”

Caroline shrugged it off: “Yeah, there’s no defender. I should be able to do that.”

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Another turning point of positivity for Ducharme came shortly after the end of her treatment at Aviv in July where she had a basketball-focused workout with an assistant coach at UConn. Everything went well and she felt great. She wasn’t in pain and she enjoyed working up a sweat. It felt good to be in a gym, dribbling and watching her shot fall through the net.

“It was the first time I felt like I could actually do it, like I could actually come back. For so long, I was kind of convinced that I was done,” Caroline says. “For the last couple years, I would just try to get through workouts without throwing up, and if I didn’t throw up, I felt good, and that was an accomplishment. So to actually feel good in a workout and enjoy it again… I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

During that workout, she took another 100 shots from 3-point land. This time, she made 91.

“I beat the score,” she says. “That made me feel better.”

The road to playing in a competitive Division I women’s college basketball game still seemed like a long one for Ducharme though.

She missed the first 28 games of this past season, but started to feel more comfortable being in arenas and on planes, and playing basketball at full speed. At the beginning of the season when she wasn’t playing, she had to wear earplugs and found tracking the ball to be a little difficult. Sometimes, she wanted to go watch from the locker room. She took baby steps and cherished small victories. She got through a full game on the sidelines, then she got through a few without earplugs, then she was able to warm up. While Caroline wasn’t playing, her parents watched games on television from home but paid close attention to her body language on the bench.

“We noticed when she stopped using earplugs,” Todd says. “That was a big deal, like a milestone.”

In her follow-up with Aviv six months after leaving the clinic, Elamir says Ducharme improved her processing speed, her executive function and her motor skills, some by as much as 12 percent.

By mid-February, Ducharme’s doctors had cleared her to play and she felt ready for it. There was just one person who had to sign off: Geno Auriemma. Ultimately, the decision to play or not play Caroline rested with him.

On Feb. 20, 2025, a conference call was held with Caroline, her parents, her doctors at Aviv, the training staff at UConn and Auriemma. The conclusion reached was that Caroline could safely play in games for the Huskies. But before the call ended, Caroline had a question.

“Coach, are you going to play me on Saturday?”

Auriemma was noncommittal: “We’ll see.”

Nonetheless, Ducharme’s parents scrambled to get flights to Indianapolis where the Huskies would be playing against Butler.

By Feb. 22, 461 days had passed since Ducharme played in a game for UConn. That night, with two minutes and 21 seconds remaining, with UConn leading by 37 points, Auriemma looked down the bench and locked eyes with the 6-foot-2 guard from Milton, Massachusetts.

“You want to play?”

She didn’t bother answering him. She just jumped out of her seat, quickly adjusted her padded headband and ran to the scorer’s table to check in. As she did, many of the more than 9,100 fans — the first sellout crowd ever at a Butler women’s basketball game — stood and cheered. With 12 seconds remaining, she secured the game’s final rebound in a dominant win for the Huskies.

“I was just so excited, even just to be able to wear my uniform again,” Ducharme said.

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Ducharme played a season-high 11 minutes in UConn’s first-round NCAA Tournament win over Arkansas State, tallying six points and four rebounds. She notched a steal in the Huskies’ Final Four win over UCLA, and even attempted a late-game 3-pointer in UConn’s national championship win over South Carolina.

Nearly a year after she arrived at Aviv, Ducharme was now standing amidst the confetti in Tampa, celebrating a title with her teammates. While climbing the ladder to cut down her piece of the nylon net, all she was focused on was keeping her balance.

“She was crying, we were all crying. It was so emotional,” Chrissy says of that day in Tampa. “Caroline released all of that. She’s not one that cries. She’s just not a crier. I think just the weight of it, to be there in this moment. We never thought we’d actually even get here. And this team is really special. They’re just all there for each other.”

Miles away in The Villages, the doctors who helped Ducharme at Aviv were watching too, ecstatic to see her play and to win.

“We watched her evolve in front of us during the treatment, and to see her hoist that trophy was icing on the cake,” Elamir said.

Ducharme is now gearing up for what will likely be her final season at UConn. She returns to a team aiming to defend its national championship. While her friend Paige Bueckers is off to the WNBA, the Huskies still bring back the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player in Azzi Fudd, All-American Sarah Strong and lightning quick guard KK Arnold.

The roster is loaded, but there’s room for Ducharme to have a real role. Versatile wings like her aren’t easy to find and can help teams win a lot of games. Throughout her disjointed career, UConn is 17-1 in contests where Ducharme knocks down multiple 3-pointers.

Her parents are trying to temper their expectations. Before her concussions, Caroline was one of the best players in the Big East. With the determination she’s shown, they know she’s capable of being that again.

“It’s one thing to just be a normal human again, and another one to be a women’s basketball player at UConn. So, there’s another level. She’s getting there. She’s close. This will be her first — technically — healthy offseason since she’s been at UConn. We’re hopeful and excited and nervous and all the emotions,” Todd Ducharme says.

“I would not bet against her. So, I don’t know how it’s going to happen. I don’t know how she’s going to do it, but she will figure it out.”