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
We're incredibly fortunate (to still be playing), and we're going to make the most of it.
We struggled with our regular stuff, so we never did get a chance to unveil our top-secret, super-sensitive, highly classified offense. That might be one of those experiments that never gets off the ground.
You don?t lose the championship and forget about it. That?s always going to be there.
We're not a great free throw shooting team but the fact that we could make that many free throws here when we had to make them, I think that's a great sign for our guys.
What we did on Monday can really scar you for a long, long time. You are going to hear about it every minute of every single day from everybody. You have to have pretty tough skin to survive in this environment, and sometimes you don't come back from stuff like that very quickly.
There are a lot of good players back, a lot of good teams. I'm anxious to see how this plays out.
With the absence of pressure, it's hard to do great things.
We're quite unpredictable. I think the kids understand that. We go five possessions where we look really good, and then we go five where the kids on the bench go, 'What was that?' We're still getting there. We're not there yet.
The really good teams, the way they separate themselves is they play well on the road. I'm really happy with our guys, because we answered a lot of different challenges tonight. When we needed a stop, we got one. If we needed a turnover, we got one. When we needed a bucket ... I liked the way we responded to all the things thrown at us.
When I look back, that's probably the one thing that I'm going to remember more than anything, not so much the championships, the wins, but I think we made the Big East take women's basketball seriously. I think we made people around the country pay attention to what we were doing. Because of that, it showed a lot of people out there that there's an unbelievable game out there that people were missing.
We want everybody to be one of the top players in the league, and it's not out of the realm of possibly to do that. We've got all the ingredients. It's just a matter of doing it.
Whenever we have to walk the ball up and attack teams in the half court, it's not easy for us, because we don't have the huge inside presence that can make teams collapse. I'm constantly urging us to run.
Whenever we have to walk the ball up and try to attack teams in their half court, it?s not easy for us, because we don?t have a huge inside presence. So I?m constantly urging us to run.