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
I was flabbergasted we couldn't execute something we have run every day in practice for the last five months.
Sometimes you get it right and you have to kind of enjoy the moment. That last five minutes, the defensive stops that we made, the things that we accomplished, that's what good teams have to do.
I sense that this year, there have been more near-upsets and more great moments in this tournament than maybe the last five combined. Which is a sign, I think, that we are going in the right direction.
They stood around and wondered how we were going to win this game tonight. Then, something clicked. I don't know if we could have won this game four, five months ago.
I remember saying that. It was right around the baseball playoffs. I always thought it was pretty cool how a manager would send a pitcher ahead to the next city to wait for his team. I wanted to give Will the opportunity to do that. Why sit around for five months doing nothing? I figured she could be up there scouting out the hotels and restaurants and sightseeing tours for us.
It just kind of disappears out of nowhere. There'll be five possessions where you'll think, 'Holy cow, that's an unbelievable play!' And then it just disappears.
Our coaches said don't worry about her. She's hitting about one 3-pointer a game. It seemed like she made one about every five minutes.
Her Achilles' is a little tight. She stretches it; she does whatever she has to do.
Chalk it up to lousy preparation. We can't run a play.
I keep thinking that it's going to work out. I keep holding out hope that it's going to work out.
You don't go in thinking how many can we win by and that's not the point of the game. The point of the game is if we do what we're supposed to do, we're going to win. But as you look at the game, you try to find areas where you know down the road are going to help you. The fact that we didn't turn the ball over (is good). We, for long stretches, got the right shot at the right time. We executed some things pretty well.
I don't know which team we're going to see: the team that we've known in the past that plays really well or the one we haven't seen before that's backed into a corner and in danger of not making the Big East tournament.
You can't gang up on the post players because they have so many good shooters on the perimeter.
I?d like to do enough to kind of get her winded, so I would think a couple possessions would probably do it.