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
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.
She finally realized that the more I do for others, the better it is for me, and in the end she ends up being better than she's ever been. I think you grow as a person when you start doing things for other people. So college was good for Barbara. The University of Connecticut was good for Barbara. And Barbara was good for the University of Connecticut.
She felt like during the regular season there were times when she may have had opportunities to take over games and didn't. And now that her career's winding down, in this scenario she wanted the ball in her hands and she wasn't afraid to take big shots.
Since I'm not going to be in Boston playing Sunday and Tuesday (at the women's Final Four) I wouldn't mind being in Indianapolis.
She played way more than I wanted her to play. I was hoping that we could limit her minutes. Ann will take (today) off and go Monday (against LSU) and then take Tuesday, Wednesday off and we'll see what happens next week. But we needed all those minutes (Saturday).
She may be as difficult a player to match up and defend as anybody I've seen up to this point.
She is assembling a really great cast here. She is taking young players and playing them. Once they are older they will know how to play together. Pitt accomplished more (yesterday) then we did.
My initial reaction right now is I saw where it's going to be announced during the Final Four. So if I'm sitting here in Connecticut and there's four teams playing in Boston at the Final Four and I get a phone call, my first reaction is I'm going to be (mad) that I'm not at the Final Four. I can tell you that much. So if I happen to be in Boston with my team and I get that phone call, it'll be kind of a special weekend.
Nerves are not an issue. To me, Ann Strother is a perfect example of someone who came in here as a freshman and was never afraid to take the big shot, to have the ball in crucial situations. Some kids are just different and they have it in them. She does.
One or two people can't get you to where you want to go. The Yankees can get to the World Series almost every year. But one or two guys really have to step up for them to win it. We needed just a little bit more tonight.
Obviously, you can?t discount how much (Diana) meant because nobody?s ever meant more to any team than Diana has meant to this group of kids. So if you want to compare them to Diana, they fall short, but so does everybody else.
No one ever talks about our defense. Our defense has always been good. But when you have great offensive players like I've coached the last 15 years, it's hard to concentrate on our defense. But our defense has been pretty good.
More important than the win, we came out with a sense that we're pretty tough, pretty resilient. I don't know if we could have been like that awhile back. We've come a long way. I don't think this trip could have gone any better for us.
My family's grown up here. I've done a million things here that I'm really proud of. (And) 99.9 percent of the time I've been treated better than I ever envisioned that I'd be treated. So I'm not looking to go anywhere. I'm not looking to run away from anything. I'm not looking to find greener pastures.