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 have won some big games on the road against some good teams, which has given the group the confidence that you need to play in these games. I don?t know that we went in feeling like we were good enough to win this thing last year. I think maybe we thought we were, but I?m not sure we really believed it.
You have to temper everything, you have to say that some of the passes that we threw, if they were thrown against teams that have great athletic ability, they might have been stolen. But you look at it and you say, ?How many turnovers should you have if you play Albany?? Well, seven is a good number.
This was probably the biggest win we've had this season because of all the things that go with it. Conference game, we're still in first place, on the road against a team that's going to be there in the end. It may not seem that big right now, but come NCAA Tournament time, some of the things we learned about ourselves tonight will really come in handy.
It's a lot like the old Virginia Tech teams we played. They're physical and they play pretty intelligently and they go after the offensive boards pretty hard. It'll probably be like the games we played against them a few years ago.
It's easier to fix the plays at the end because they are one-shot deals. What got us 13 down is a little bit harder to fix. I'd have disappointed if it went from 13 to 20. The fact that it went from 13 to two, that's a positive. But getting down 13 on your home court against a Rutgers team that we knew coming in was going to be hard to guard in the perimeter, I'm just really disappointed in the way we came out and played the game.
You can't just run plays against a good defensive team. You've got to make them. We let one (bad) play lead to another and another and another ... until it just got completely away from us.
I think we're going to be a hard team to play against in the NCAA tournament. We play good defense. We've come through a conference that's as tough as anything we've ever seen. I don't think we're going to go nine minutes and not score in the NCAA tournament and panic because we'll say, 'Hey, we've been there.' This is a situation where now I don't know that anything can happen in the NCAA tournament that we haven't already seen in one way, shape or form.
I think Brittany Hunter is capable of playing lousy against anybody like she did (Sunday) night. And I think she's capable of playing great like she played against Tennessee, against anybody.
Just having that makes everybody else around you a lot better. So I'm looking forward to that. We haven't had that in a while. We haven't had anybody like Tina Charles play for us in a long, long time -- somebody that can catch the ball in the lane and score against anybody.
I think it was harder than all the other 12 put together. I thought our guys battled through a lot of stuff tonight. We played against a really good team that played their hearts out.
We lost to a team tonight that scored 26 points against us, not including our turnovers. They scored 22 points off our turnovers and finished with 48. They shot 20-something (26.3) percent from the floor, and we lose the game. That's probably the most incredible stat you'll ever see in your life.
Playing at Louisville, at DePaul, at Villanova, at Notre Dame, at Texas, and we're going to go to Rutgers... I think we've had the toughest stretch of anybody else in the league. And for us to play well and to win, that's a huge step for us because I don't think this group really believed last year that we could win on the road against good teams.
If we play as well as we're capable of playing, we're going to win (tonight) regardless of what Rutgers does. If we don't play our 'A' or to the best of our ability, then there's a pretty good chance that if Rutgers plays well we're going to lose. And that's the way it should be when you play against a really good team. But, you know what? We're home. We're in our building. And the expectation level is we're going to win. That's the bottom line.
The kids know each other, believe me. They've all played against each other at various levels.