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 afraid of that. We came off some of the games we just had and we were feeling pretty good. We're playing a game where their No.1 player is hurt, and physically we're not 100 percent coming out of the road trip. You put all those things in the mix, it made for one lousy game.
Renee is making a real case to be the starting point guard. She makes things happen. She makes plays. She's assertive. She acts like she's a real good player and that goes a long way into believing you're a real good player.
We were lousy. I told the players the one good thing that game out of this was we won the game. Other than that I can't think of really anything that came out of this that was good.
I think players sometimes don?t understand fully the amount of responsibility on their shoulders. As a senior, you have to take on that responsibility every day -- practice, games, travel, locker room, you name it. I think in the Big East tournament, they really, really, really did that. They took it to heart and made sure all the little things that lead to winning were taken care of. I really admire them for that.
This time of year, it's the individual player that makes the difference. The things you do as a program gets you to this point. Then individuals decide the outcome of the games.
This time of year, a team's systems don't matter. It's individual players that end up deciding the outcomes of the games.
This time of the year, it's individual players who make the difference. Your style of play, your system as a program gets you to this point and then individual players end up deciding the outcome of the game. Ann stepped up and made some huge plays.
There are a lot of players who score a lot of points and they get them whether their team is winning or losing. Ann's always been more about timing and not about how many.
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.
Having a senior athletic enough that she can play inside and outside and can move some of their players away from the basket, not having that allowed them to pack it in. It made it difficult for us to get anything going, but at the same time, Pitt's defense and how physical they were had more to do with it than Turner not playing.
Fair or unfair, at Connecticut it's not good enough just to win. There's a perception that if we don't go to the Final Four, it's a bad season. I want the players to understand that the one constant in our program, is that we want to make sure we play hard and have fun.
Obviously in the long term, as the season wears on, there's no way you can be as good a team without someone who is, I think, one of the best five players in the league. Meg can put up 20 points every night, and that has to be comforting. But this West Virginia team is still one of the best that I've seen. That team is very difficult to play against.
Right now, it seems like Will has made a commitment to herself to be one of the better players at her position in our league. And certainly it's not beyond the realm of possibilities for will. If you think about it, she's got all the ingredients.
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.