Price hopes to someday swap Final Four stories with his father, but he's running out of time. He's the senior point guard for Connecticut, the No. 1 seed in the West Regional, which will play No. 16 seed Chattanooga today in a first-round game at the Wachovia Center.
Strange as it may seem for a senior at a school that has advanced to the Sweet 16 nine times since 1994 and the Elite Eight six times since 1995, Price, the Huskies' leading scorer, has only nine minutes of playing time in the NCAA tourney.
His first crack at extended playing time on the game's biggest stage came last season - UConn didn't make the tourney two years ago. Nine minutes into a first-round game against San Diego, Price tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee. Without their top playmaker and one of their best three-point shooters, the Huskies went down to a 70-69 defeat in overtime.
"Last year I felt good and something unfortunate happened," he said. "I'm feeling good this year, and we'll see what happens."
A lot has happened to Price since he chose UConn among the bevy of schools that recruited him. He's an example of a young man who has taken the bad with the good. He missed his freshman year because of a condition called arteriovenous malformation, which caused bleeding in his brain. After radiosurgery treatment, he was cleared to play for the 2006-07 season. But that wasn't until after the university suspended him for the '05-06 academic year because he was involved in the theft of laptop computers.
There may be no other player in the tourney who has been through as much as Price, so a trip to the Final Four would be especially sweet.
"I really haven't gotten that far ahead of myself yet," the 6-foot-2 guard said. "Everybody knows I've been through a lot in my college career. It's still going. That's the way I look at it. Got one last tournament to play in, and we could play as many as six more games."
