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UConn’s Freshman Center Stands Out Off the Bench

ALBANY, N.Y. — Like a lot of boys, Donovan Clingan competed in many activities while growing up in Bristol, Conn.: baseball, basketball, fishing and soccer.

But when his mother, Stacey Porrini Clingan, died of breast cancer in March 2018 at age 42, Donovan, then 14, decided to channel his pain, passion and prodigious frame into basketball in her honor. A 6-foot-4 center, Porrini Clingan had starred at Bristol Central High School before attending the University of Maine, where she helped the Black Bears make three straight N.C.A.A. tournaments beginning in 1995.

“I really didn’t take basketball seriously when she was here, I just played it for fun,” Donovan Clingan, now a 7-foot-2, 265-pound, 19-year-old freshman center at UConn, said in the locker room after the Huskies beat St.