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
You go to college to find out about yourself and I'll bet you nobody found out more about themselves in the four years at Connecticut than Barbara Turner. So you've got to be really happy for the kid.
We're a horrible rebounding team, especially when we play with four guards. So we're not exactly gangbusters in that area. We're going to have to, obviously, do a much better job of that next week (at No. 1 Tennessee).
That would be pretty ironic, wouldn't it? Maybe it's meant to be that way. Hard to say, but it would be pretty neat. How about she's in the starting lineup at the Final Four and knocks in the first play of the game and scores 30 and is the MVP and rides off into sunset? You never know how it's going to be.
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.
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.
I want them to be remembered for being at Connecticut for four years and having had an incredible experience during those four years that no one else got to experience in their four years. It?s unfair to think of them as, ?Well, this is how it ended.? It ended not great, but there was a lot of great stuff that they were a part of.
It has been a ridiculous three weeks in terms of my thought process. During all that time when the Final Four was going on, flying out to California, Hall of Fame, all of that, there was a lot going on personally for me where I'm trying to sort out how long am I going to do this? Where am I going to go from here? What else am I going to do?
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 feel bad for the kid. She was working so hard and just when you thought she had it going, that happens, and now she?s kind of back to, not exactly square one, but ... I?m hoping these next four games, we can get her ready.
If you win, what do they give you? Trophies? Plaques? Rings? If you lose, do they take stuff away? ... We could win Monday by 25 and still come in fourth in our league.
I know we didn't win the regular season, but I don't know how finishing second was all that great when you have to get the winner of South Florida-Notre Dame in the first round. I'm saying to myself, the four teams with a bye, this is what we get for a great season. I'm not sure that's ever been the case. They've come into this league and dramatically altered the landscape. They certainly have benefited and we have benefited from it also.
Barbara said she knew it was in as soon as she shot it. She's told me a lot of lies over the last four years, but that was the biggest one I've ever heard.
We weren't sure whether or not it was real serious or mildly serious or whatever. When we got back, it was X-rayed and there's no fractures. It's just a bad ankle sprain and she's definitely out for Saturday and then we'll take it from there.
We got the big lead and we had a chance, when pressure came, to really make some plays to extend it. But we let one play lead to another to another to another. It just got completely away from us. I guess credit their defense, but I was just looking at the stat sheet.