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
Watching them play kind of brought back memories of when you spring an upset. I don't remember the last time we had a chance to spring an upset on somebody. It's a great feeling for them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We're incredibly fortunate (to still be playing), and we're going to make the most of it.
We're incorrigible. All those threes, we were in a really bad zone. Mentally in a bad zone and a bad zone defense. I think we looked a little tired. Except when we had the ball. We didn't look tired when we had the ball offensively.
We're in a good bracket with good teams like everybody else is. Say all you want about who's in a tough bracket, who's not? The bottom line is, starting this weekend everybody will get to a chance to prove whether they belong there or not.
There are a lot of good players back, a lot of good teams. I'm anxious to see how this plays out.
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.
We're playing a team that doesn't lose at home. I'll be anxious to see how we approach it.