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 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.
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.
We're 18-2 and it doesn't feel that way. I don't feel overly comfortable or ecstatic. I just like where we are right now, but I know that there's a lot in front of us, so I'm not ready to make any defining statements yet. We've played pretty good basketball, but I don't know that we've played an exceptional game at both ends. So I think there's a lot of room for improvement, a lot of room for growth.
The first week or so is not bad. It's those last 10 days where they've been cooped up. That's when it's awful. So, for now, the novelty hasn't worn off yet. But it's not an ideal situation. It really isn't.
It has been a ridiculous three weeks in terms of my thought process. During all that time when the Final Four was going on, flying out to California, Hall of Fame, all of that, there was a lot going on personally for me where I'm trying to sort out how long am I going to do this? Where am I going to go from here? What else am I going to do?
The alternative would be that you're dealing with this thing all year long. A week she's good, a week she's bad, and back and forth. I'm hopeful that by keeping her out those two weeks that we got to the root of the problem and fixed it. But, again, we'll never know. We'll just keep our fingers crossed.
Probably another week and a half, (the trainers) said. That's the word that I got, another week and a half. They don't want to rush her back. She did it once. She hurried up to get back on the court because she's been out for so long.
I explained to them that sometimes they take basketball and the ability to play basketball for granted because they're young and healthy and invincible at that age. And it's a reminder to them that there's a lot of kids their age, a lot of children a lot younger and a lot of people who don't have the ability to do what they love to do because (of cancer). Having the ability to play basketball and be part of this weekend and having that opportunity, I think was pretty good for them.
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.