Geno Auriemma

Geno Auriemma
Luigi "Geno" Auriemma is an Italian-born American college basketball coach and the head coach of the University of Connecticut Huskies women's basketball team. He has led UConn to eleven NCAA Division I national championships, a feat matched by no one else in college basketball, and has won seven national Naismith College Coach of the Year awards. Auriemma has been the head coach of the United States women's national basketball team since 2009, during which time his teams won the 2010...
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth23 March 1954
CityMontella, Italy
The first week or so is not bad. It's those last 10 days where they've been cooped up. That's when it's awful. So, for now, the novelty hasn't worn off yet. But it's not an ideal situation. It really isn't.
She has too much ability to not play well. She just came out and just shot it and made plays. She found a way to be a real basketball player (Tuesday) as opposed to just somebody who plays point guard at Connecticut and runs up and down the floor. (Tuesday) she was a real basketball player.
She played way more than I wanted her to play. I was hoping that we could limit her minutes. Ann will take (today) off and go Monday (against LSU) and then take Tuesday, Wednesday off and we'll see what happens next week. But we needed all those minutes (Saturday).
I thought we could get away with not playing Ann. I thought we were in pretty good shape at 12-4. I didn't know that was the highlight of the first half ? getting to 12.
Right now she?s playing with a lot of confidence. There?s nothing Barbara can?t do out there; it?s just a matter of being locked in mentally and right now she seems to be.
I think it takes some of the luster off the regular season championship. Now, it doesn't carry as much weight as it used to. Some years, there are breaks in the schedule. Some years are tougher than normal. It's not conducive to having a regular season champion.
It has been a ridiculous three weeks in terms of my thought process. During all that time when the Final Four was going on, flying out to California, Hall of Fame, all of that, there was a lot going on personally for me where I'm trying to sort out how long am I going to do this? Where am I going to go from here? What else am I going to do?
The alternative would be that you're dealing with this thing all year long. A week she's good, a week she's bad, and back and forth. I'm hopeful that by keeping her out those two weeks that we got to the root of the problem and fixed it. But, again, we'll never know. We'll just keep our fingers crossed.
I think we know pretty well after this trip that we?re pretty good. We?re not as good as you want to be yet, but we?re pretty good.
They haven't done anything wrong yet in practice. They love it here. They think this is the greatest place in the world, and they should. In addition, this is probably the most energetic and upbeat group of kids that we've had here in a long, long time. Individually and collectively, they have fun and have outgoing personalities. They are just a joy to be around and I think they are going to contribute because they are that good.
I think she's taking it pretty seriously. You know, it's that time of the year.
I think we have a pretty good record in the NCAA tournament regardless of where we play. So the fact that we've won a lot of games here is probably indicative that we've had a lot of really good teams.
I think there are a lot of teams that are going to make the NCAA tournament that are not as good as Texas. With their conference, they have a chance to play some really good teams and if they can knock off one or two of them . . .
It's always been good. The last two times we've played in this building it's been exceptional.