Lou Lopez Sénéchal (born May 12, 1998) is a Mexican-French professional

basketball Basketball is a team sport in which two teams, most commonly of five players each, opposing one another on a rectangular Basketball court, court, compete with the primary objective of #Shooting, shooting a basketball (ball), basketball (appro ...

player for the

Dallas Wings The Dallas Wings are an American professional basketball team based in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. The Wings compete in the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) as a member of the Western Conference. The team is owned by a group ...

of the

Women's National Basketball Association The Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) is a women's professional basketball league in the United States. The league comprises 13 teams (scheduled to expand to 15 in 2026). The WNBA is headquartered in Midtown Manhattan. The WNBA w ...

(WNBA) and Hozono Global Jairis of the

Liga Femenina de Baloncesto The Liga Femenina de Baloncesto, also known as Liga Femenina Endesa for sponsorship reasons, is the highest level of sports league, league competition for women's basketball in Spain. It is the women's equivalent of the men's Liga ACB and is run by ...

. She played her collegiate basketball for the

UConn Huskies The UConn Huskies (or Connecticut Huskies) are the College athletics in the United States, intercollegiate athletic teams that represent the University of Connecticut, with its main campus located in Storrs, Connecticut. The school is a member of ...

of the

Big East Conference The Big East Conference (stylized as BIG EAST) is a collegiate List of NCAA conferences, athletic conference that competes in National Collegiate Athletic Association, NCAA NCAA Division I, Division I in 10 men's sports and 12 women's sports. H ...

. She previously played for the

Fairfield Stags The Fairfield Stags are the athletic programs representing Fairfield University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Most of the programs are members of the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC) and classified as Division I (non-football) in the Nat ...

and was named MAAC Player of the Year as a senior. She was selected 5th overall in the 2023 WNBA draft by the

Early life

Lopez Sénéchal was born in

Guadalajara, Mexico Guadalajara ( ; ) is the capital and the most populous city in the western Mexican List of states of Mexico, state of Jalisco, as well as the most densely populated municipality in Jalisco. According to the 2020 census, the city has a population ...

. 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 Grenoble ( ; ; or ; or ) is the prefecture and largest city of the Isère department in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region of southeastern France. It was the capital of the Dauphiné historical province and lies where the river Drac flows in ...

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, but 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." 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 were 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 The University of Massachusetts Lowell (UMass Lowell and UML) is a Public university, public research university in Lowell, Massachusetts, with a satellite campus in Haverhill, Massachusetts. It is the northernmost member of the University of M ...

Tulsa Tulsa ( ) is the second-most-populous city in the state of Oklahoma, after Oklahoma City, and the 48th-most-populous city in the United States. The population was 413,066 as of the 2020 census. It is the principal municipality of the Tul ...

Akron Akron () is a city in Summit County, Ohio, United States, and its county seat. It is the fifth-most populous city in Ohio, with a population of 190,469 at the 2020 census. The Akron metropolitan area, covering Summit and Portage counties, had ...

Duquesne __NOTOC__ Duquesne or Duchesne ( , ; old spelling Du Quesne, American spelling DuQuesne) is a family name derived from a northern dialectal form of French (Norman and Picard) meaning ''du chêne'' in French ("of the oak"). The anglicization of t ...

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.

College career

Fairfield

Lopez Sénéchal played for four years and graduated from

Fairfield University Fairfield University is a private university, private Society of Jesus, Jesuit university in Fairfield, Connecticut. It was founded by the Jesuits in 1942. In 2023, the university had about 5,000 full-time undergraduate students and 1,200 gra ...

before transferring to

UConn The University of Connecticut (UConn) is a public land-grant research university system with its main campus in Storrs, Connecticut, United States. It was founded in 1881 as the Storrs Agricultural School, named after two benefactors. In 1893, ...

. 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 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. 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 seeded 15th and faced second seed

Texas Texas ( , ; or ) is the most populous U.S. state, state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. It borders Louisiana to the east, Arkansas to the northeast, Oklahoma to the north, New Mexico to the we ...

, 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. In the first quarter of the game against Texas, the elbow of Texas's Lauren Ebo connected with Lopez Sénéchal's face. Ebo went to the foul line with the score 12–8 in favor of Texas. Lopez Sénéchal had to go to the locker room, where she received two stitches to close a cut. She did not play the remainder of the first half. She returned in the second half and almost immediately hit a three pointer. Texas won this first round match by a score of 70 to 52.

UConn

When Morgan Valley saw Lopez Sénéchal's name in the

NCAA transfer portal The NCAA transfer portal is a National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) application, database, and compliance tool created to manage and facilitate the process for student athletes seeking to transfer between member institutions. It is i ...

, she had already heard the name "dozens of times". Fairfield is only an hour and 1/2 drive from the UConn campus, and Valley had discussions with a coach of a competing team about the challenges of stopping Lopez Sénéchal. When Valley saw the name in the portal, she immediately began doing some research viewing game films and reaching out to the Fairfield head coach, Joe Frager, to find out whether she would be a fit at UConn. Frager, who has known UConn coach

Geno Auriemma Luigi "Geno" Auriemma (born March 23, 1954) is an American basketball coach who is the head coach of the University of Connecticut Huskies women's basketball team. He holds the NCAA basketball records for wins and winning percentage with a mi ...

for decades, "understood the demands of the Huskies program" and responded that she would be "more than fine at UConn". Valley shared the video clips with Auriemma and the rest of the UConn staff which led to zoom meetings with Lopez Sénéchal while the UConn coaches were in Minneapolis for the Final Four. At Fairfield, virtually all the scoring plays were run through her. The initial expectations were that Lopez Sénéchal would play more of a reserve role, and it was important that she feel comfortable with this change. Her goals were to get a shot at playing pro, and she felt that even a reduced role at UConn would provide the visibility and competition that would help earn a spot on a WNBA roster. While Auriemma originally expected her to get some minutes, he upgraded his opinion after a few days of practice. "After the first five days, I pretty much said, 'Someone who was a starter isn't going to start this year, Auriemma said. "That's how impressive she was." With star guards Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd injured during Lopez Sénéchal's final year at UConn, Lou became one of the team's top scorers, helping to carry the team all the way to the Final Four. She played over thirty minutes a game during the season and established herself as one of the leading shooting guards in the country.

Professional Career

The Dallas Wings selected Lopez Senechal during the 2023 WNBA Draft with the fifth overall pick. However, she did not play during the 2023 season due to a knee injury. She played during the 2024 season but saw limited minutes behind several other guards. She decided not to play during the 2025 season due to personal reasons.

Career statistics

WNBA

Regular season

''Stats current through end of 2024 season'' , - class="sortbottom" , align=left, ''2023'' , colspan=13 align=center, ''Did not play (injury)'' , - , align=left, , align=left,

Dallas Dallas () is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of Texas metropolitan areas, most populous metropolitan area in Texas and the Metropolitan statistical area, fourth-most ...

, 27, , 0, , 4.6, , .294, , .200, , .500, , 0.4, , 0.4, , 0.1, , 0.0, , 0.2, , 0.9 , - class="sortbottom" , align=center, Career , align=center, 1 year, 1 team , 27, , 0, , 4.6, , .294, , .200, , .500, , 0.4, , 0.4, , 0.1, , 0.0, , 0.2, , 0.9

College

, - , width="10%" style="text-align:center;" , 2018–19 , style="text-align:center;", Fairfield , 22, , 22, , 30.5, , .414, , .328, , .857, , 4.7, , 1.8, , 1.2, , 0.5, , 2.0, , 11.8 , - , style="text-align:center;", 2019–20 , style="text-align:center;", Fairfield , 30, , 30, , 34.3, , .431, , .392, , .856, , 5.7, , 1.6, , 1.0, , 0.8, , 2.3, , 15.5 , - , style="text-align:center;",

2020–21 The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen ...

, style="text-align:center;", Fairfield , 16, , 16, , 33.4, , .424, , .407, , .830, , 3.4, , 1.6, , 0.9, , 0.5, , 2.4, , 16.9 , - , style="text-align:center;", 2021–22 , style="text-align:center;", Fairfield , 31, , 31, , 34.0, , .449, , .409, , .800, , 4.6, , 1.1, , 1.0, , 0.4, , 1.9, , 19.5 , - , style="text-align:center;",

2022–23 The dash is a punctuation mark consisting of a long horizontal line. It is similar in appearance to the hyphen but is longer and sometimes higher from the baseline. The most common versions are the endash , generally longer than the hyphen ...

, style="text-align:center;",

, 37, , 37, , 31.5, , .476, , .440, , .854, , 3.1, , 1.6, , 0.5, , 0.3, , 2.0, , 15.5 , - class="sortbottom" , style="text-align:center;" colspan=2, Career , 136, , 136, , 32.8, , .444, , .405, , .837, , 4.3, , 1.5, , 0.9, , 0.5, , 2.1, , 16.0

Awards and honors

* MAAC Tournament MVP (2022) * MAAC Player of the Year (2022) * MAAC Rookie of the Year(2019) * MAAC All-Academic Team (2020, 2021, 2022) * First Team All-BIG EAST (2023) * Big East All-Tournament team (2023)

References

External links

Fairfield Stags bioUConn Huskies bio
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Lopez Senechal, Lou 1998 births Living people Dallas Wings draft picks Dallas Wings players Fairfield Stags women's basketball players Forwards (basketball) French expatriate basketball people in the United States French expatriate sportspeople in Ireland French people of Mexican descent French women's basketball players Guards (basketball) Mexican emigrants to France Sportspeople from Grenoble Sportspeople from Guadalajara, Jalisco UConn Huskies women's basketball players French expatriate basketball people in Spain French expatriate sportspeople in the Czech Republic 21st-century French sportswomen