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 were lousy. I told the players the one good thing that game out of this was we won the game. Other than that I can't think of really anything that came out of this that was good.
We needed some time. The only days we did anything was Friday and Saturday. Both of the days were more of just getting our heads rather than our bodies ready. We had a talk last night with the team and a lot of really good things came out.
We came out with a sense that we're pretty tough.
We came out of this game feeling like Pitt lost the game rather than we won the game. We didn't beat them like we have so many other times. They are one of the most aggressive teams we have played this season. We won because we have a little more talent and little more experience.
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.
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.
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.
It's going to be like this every night on the road. And I told our guys, more important than the win, I think, is we came out with something that was really important. We came out with a sense of, we're pretty tough and we're pretty resilient, and I don't know that we could have been like that a while back. So we've made progress. We've come a long way and I don't think it could have gone any better for us.
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.
The Brittany thing is a lot better than we could have even imagined. We could be sitting here right now talking about how the meniscus transplant didn't work as well as we liked and it doesn't look like she will play. That was a possibility. And here we're looking at it and - knock on wood - she hasn't had one incident with that since she started being able to do things. That came out way better than we anticipated.
The Brittany thing is a lot better than we could have even imagined, ... We could be sitting here right now talking about how the meniscus transplant didn't work as well as we liked and it doesn't look like she will play. That was a possibility. And here we're looking at it and - knock on wood - she hasn't had one incident with that since she started being able to do things. That came out way better than we anticipated.
I was afraid of that. We came off some of the games we just had and we were feeling pretty good. We're playing a game where their No.1 player is hurt, and physically we're not 100 percent coming out of the road trip. You put all those things in the mix, it made for one lousy game.
I think we came out of the game feeling that Pitt lost rather than we won. We didn't really come out here and beat Pitt like we did so many other times.
In some places if you get to the Final Eight and lose to the No. 1 seed and win 32 games, there's 6,000 people waiting to meet you at the airport when you go home. But with us, with our tradition, people say, 'What happened?' We're just a team that came close . . . a team that almost had a chance to be great.