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
The strength of your league is what is going on in the middle. We have always been good at the top. But we will have teams finishing 10th, 11th 12th in our league who are pretty darned good, and I don't know that anybody else has that.
Whether it's Phoenix or whether it's any other team in that league, they're not going to offer me more money than I'm making at Connecticut. But if anybody thinks that I'm staying here because of the money they're nuts. I didn't come here for the money and I'm not going to stay here for the money. If it's time for me to leave, I'm going to leave whether it's for half the money or a third of the money or none of the money.
She's one of those impact players that makes them when we need them. I can't think of anybody we'd rather have shooting the ball.
She may be as difficult a player to match up and defend as anybody I've seen up to this point.
Everybody leaves at some point, ... You can't stay forever. There's going to come a day when I'm not coaching at Connecticut anymore. I would think everybody understands that. Tomorrow? Next month? No. Next year? Probably not. But anybody who says never is lying.
Whereas before, we didn't know whether we could go on a run like that and get up big on some teams. Now we know that. And we also know that if they come back, we've got what it takes to finish the job. Whether we do or not next time we're in that situation, I don't know. I don't think anybody comes through 100 percent of the time. ... As long as we have a chance to win with three minutes to go, I like our chances.
Anybody that knows Rene, knows that she loves to say things that irritate people and she's one of the best in the country at it.
I think that fear factor stuff is gone. I just don't think anybody in the country is afraid of anybody anymore. Teams just think they can walk in any building and win any game.
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.
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.
For the first time since 1994, there isn't anybody sitting there saying, 'You know, there's three or four teams that can win the national championship: Connecticut and three other teams.' First time in 12 years. So, how they react to that is going to be interesting. They might like being in that situation.
I don't think they've surprised anybody in the Big East with their performance this season. They're going to be an NCAA-level team for a long time.
I know that when she gets it going you can't guard her. She can make the three. She can take you off the dribble. She is as strong as anybody else on the court. She has the mentality of a scorer. And she defends. To me,every good team starts with a good point guard.