Alec Millender was in awe his first time walking around UConn’s practice facility, seeing all of the evidence that his favorite player, Kemba Walker, spent his college career across the street in Gampel Pavilion.
He tried to stay calm when he met Walker for the first time on the team’s road trip to Villanova last week. Walker was at the game in Philadelphia with fellow program legends Shabazz Napier, Jeremy Lamb and Rudy Gay. But Millender quickly turned into a fanboy.
“I said I was gonna keep it cool, and then I was like, you know what, actually I’m not gonna keep it cool. I told him, ‘I was doing step backs like third to sixth grade, ever since I saw you. I put that Husky jersey on because of you.’ Yeah, I told him that,” Millender said, commanding his first media scrum at UConn like a seasoned stand-up comic.
“He told me, like, ‘You’re my guy now. You’re part of the brotherhood.’ I couldn’t wait to text my brother and sister that I just met Kemba. I took a picture too. I’m gonna post it soon, so be looking for it.”
Got some DAWGS in the building 😤 pic.twitter.com/GwBugeMSoY
— UConn Men’s Basketball (@UConnMBB) February 21, 2026
It was clear ahead of his Senior Day why Millender, who scored over 1,000 career points during his time at IU Indianapolis and Division II Wayne State, has been a perfect culture fit at UConn. Coach Dan Hurley called him “an excellent practice player and maybe the best guy in the locker room with this team.”
He has only played in 13 games, a total of 47 minutes, but he’s having the time of his life as a Husky.
“It’s been everything I ever dreamed of,” he said. “Taking every day with a professional approach, being ready just in case the opportunity does come… My form of coping with anything is pretty much laughter and jokes… Everywhere I’ve been it’s pretty much been just laughing, jokes, ‘the show has arrived’ almost. I gotta have fun everywhere I go, gotta sing, gotta dance, gotta laugh, gotta rap, freestyle a little bit. Everywhere I’ve been it’s been like that, since I was a child.”
Millender coordinates most of the team’s bonding opportunities off the court, whether it be a trip to get hibachi or just gathering to sit around and watch a game with food. He is the commissioner of the team’s EA College Football video game league – a “bad commissioner,” according to Tarris Reed Jr., who was kicked out and won’t be let back in because he was “so bad.”
“The guy gets it. He understands. I think he made a real mature decision to be here. I think maybe in his mind he probably would have gotten more of a chance to play and there might have been times where I could have played him, but you would never know by the way he carries himself day in and day out,” Hurley said. “The most positive guy. You meet his dad and you understand the family dynamic, he’s just a special, unique human being. The guy is going to achieve incredible success in his life in whatever he does because he’s just got special qualities.”
Dwayne Koroma was in a similar boat when he made his decision to come to UConn after playing against the Huskies last season for Le Moyne. A native of Berlin, Germany, he began his career at Iona, playing 15.4 minutes per game for Rick Pitino, then spent two years at Salt Lake Community College before transferring to UT-Arlington for the 2023-24 season.
An undersized 6-foot-8 center, he averaged 11.5 points and 7.2 rebounds per game with Le Moyne last year – including 13 points and five rebounds against the Huskies – and could’ve found a landing spot in a rotation elsewhere.
Koroma played a key role in nonconference games earlier this season when Reed missed time to injury. He hasn’t seen much action since Big East play began, but he was able to get in at the end of the 32-point win over St. John’s on Wednesday and score four points with his mother and little brother in the building. UConn had flown them in from Germany to watch him play for the first time in six or seven years, he said.
“The fact that UConn made it happen for them to come out here and watch me play, for me to spend some time with them, it was truly amazing. I’m so grateful,” he said.
“(This experience) been everything that I expected it to be, and more. Just for my last year, I just wanted to go somewhere and really give myself a chance to win something. Obviously all the schools I’ve been at, they’ve never been like a contending school. So coming here in this program, this culture is something that I really wanted for myself and wanted to be a part of.”
“Guys like him and Alec, they came in here with the hope that they’d be able to get on the court and help us win games, which both guys have done. But they also wanted the experience of being in a sports organization at this level,” Hurley said. “Him nor Alec have ever lost any enthusiasm for the team or just the team mentality. They would play on most other college teams.”
