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 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.
I don't care if you have the best team in the country or are Cinderella, this is the hardest game to play in that you'll ever play in. The goal for most people is to have an experience of being in the Final Four. After you've been to the Final Four there's no experience like it, except winning a national championship.
I believe the way the game played out at Rutgers really stung them like nothing ever did before. I think there was a tremendous amount of soul searching and really trying to come to grips with who we are and what our strengths are and what our faults are and what we need to do.
Certainly it has become the game that everybody in the Big East points to.
I would say for 32 minutes we were pretty good. Six or seven minutes I think in that first half maybe weren't that good, but I think this was as complete a game at both ends of the floor as we've had in a while.
I?d like to do enough to kind of get her winded, so I would think a couple possessions would probably do it.
I'd like to be able to dial it up when we needed it. Unfortunately, sometimes you keep waiting and waiting and it never happens. My hope is that some time in the next 24 hours we play as close to our ability as we can. Right now, I think we need to play one of the best games that we've played. I don't know where we are in terms of that, but I'd like to see us come close to that (tonight).
I don't even remember who the coach was before Sue. LSU and Sue became one and the same.
I'd like to see her shoot the ball more from the foul line. She's a good shooter from 15 feet out. And she still gets ahead of herself every once in a while, which is natural. Slowly, but surely, it's going to come. It's just going to look ugly at times. As long as she keeps making progress, that's all I care about.
I don't know that we ever go into a tournament that much under the radar. But if that's the case then this year would be certainly as close to that as I've seen in a while.
Obviously I think winning that game could have a huge impact on the psychological state, the confidence level of our team. That's obvious. But at the same time, we're home. We're Connecticut. Everybody think we're one of the top-10 teams in the country. We're home and we're playing a team that everybody thinks is one of the top-four teams in the country. Going into the game, yeah, we expect to win this game. That's what you're supposed to think if you're us.
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.
Obviously, coming off a game like that, we've got a lot of work to do. It's never easy to lose, and especially difficult to lose when a conference championship is at stake. It's magnified when we play as well as we did for 15 minutes and then go completely the other way. It takes the life out of you completely.
Right now, my issue is recruiting, and getting ready for the season and making sure that we put ourselves in position to win a national championship.