Lou Lopez Sénéchal

Lou Lopez Sénéchal (born May 12, 1998 ) is a Mexican-French professional basketball player for the Dallas Wings of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA).

Lopez Sénéchal played her collegiate basketball for the UConn Huskies of the Big East Conference.

She previously played for the Fairfield Stags and was named MAAC Player of the Year as a senior.

She was selected 5th overall in the 2023 WNBA draft by the Dallas Wings.

Lopez Sénéchal was born in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Her father Carlos Lopez is Mexican and her mother Sophie Sénéchal is French.

Her parents separated when she was five.

She moved to Grenoble, France with her mother while her father remained in Mexico.

She had grown up playing soccer but she tried basketball for the first time at the age of eight.

With her soccer experience she had no problem with her legs using her hands to dribble was new.

But this was the first time she truly felt at home while in France, because the sport was new to everyone in the class so she no longer "felt like an outsider. On the basketball court, she felt like an equal."

The team, led by Lopez Sénéchal, helped extend that retirement date as long as possible, winning their first conference title since 1998.

That automatically qualified them for an NCAA tournament bid, their first such bid since 2001.

They were seated 15th and faced second seed Texas, ranked seventh in the country.

They arrived in Austin two days before the game and met for a team dinner, with players pointing out that it was the first such team dinner in a restaurant for two years due to COVID restrictions.

She attended high school in France but in 2017–18, she played basketball at the North Atlantic Basketball Academy in Ireland.

While she was playing in Ireland, she had a chance conversation with a friend.

Her friend remarked "I'm going to Canada to play college basketball".

Until that conversation, she had never considered the possibility of playing in the Americas, but after the conversation it was all she could think about.

Along with her stepfather, she communicated with schools throughout the US.

With help from her stepdad, they reached out to two hundred and eighty schools in both Division I and Division II.

The only schools they didn't consider whether those ranked in the top twenty-five, which at the time seemed too much of a stretch.

They received some responses, so the family scheduled a trip to the states that offered for scholarships.

The schools included UMass Lowell, Tulsa, Akron, Duquesne and Fairfield.

The head coach at Fairfield, Joe Frager, planned a 45 minute workout to see what she could do.

After only 10 minutes he indicated that the workout was over.

She asked him what she had done wrong, he responded that she had done everything right.

He had seen plenty of game film but wanted to see her in action to assess her personal attributes.

He concluded she was open to being coached.

Lopez Sénéchal accepted the offer and enrolled at Fairfield.

Lopez Sénéchal played for four years and graduated from Fairfield University before transferring to UConn.

She is 6-foot-1in tall and plays wing.

In her freshman year, she sat for an interview with the Fairfield Mirror, the student newspaper at the school.

She discussed the challenges of adapting to college in the United States after living in France most of her life.

She played while basketball in France and Ireland, and noted that her teammates and friends were typically 25 years old or older, while she was now playing with teammates closer to her age.

By her senior year she was being described as "arguably the conference's best offensive player".

That description followed a 26 point performance against Quinnipiac, leading to "a convincing 72-60 win"  by Fairfield over Quinnipiac on their home floor.

At the time, Quinnipiac was the five-time regular-season champion of the MAAC.

At Fairfield, she led the team to an appearance in the NCAA tournament.

Before the season started, the head coach of Fairfield, Joe Frager, had announced his retirement as of the end of the season.