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
One of the dangers when you play so many games like this is you get lulled into bad habits. That first half we were just content to go up and down and trade baskets. Army did exactly what I thought they would do. They were patient, they run their stuff, they grind it out.
The thing that gets us in trouble like the first half is we play too fast. One of the terms I use with our guys is, we play like our hair's on fire. We just run around. The second half we were much more under control.
Offensively I think we're doing a lot more things, and a lot better, than we've done them in a long time. But that first half left some things to be desired. No question about that.
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.
That second 20 minutes was obviously like night and day. And that's a little bit worrisome for me. You always want to treat every game the same, treat every half the same. But I guess we had played pretty well up to this point and that was kind of the first bad 20 minutes that we've played in a while.
I don't think it was as bad as it could get. If it had been like that in the second half, it would have been. We shot poorly, we played poorly, we executed poorly in that first half, but fortunately the second half was the way we like to play.
I thought Renee set the tone in the second half by how aggressive she was. She was looking to score and make a play every time down the floor.
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.