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
(Duffy) should get 40 points if she played the way she did in the last 10 minutes. She's just one of those unselfish kids who wants to get the other people on her team the ball. She showed in the last 10 minutes how hard she is to defend.
Brittany did a lot of good things tonight. If we know we can get 10-15 minutes from her every night like that, that changes things.
I would say for 32 minutes we were pretty good. Six or seven minutes I think in that first half maybe weren't that good, but I think this was as complete a game at both ends of the floor as we've had in a while.
Obviously, coming off a game like that, we've got a lot of work to do. It's never easy to lose, and especially difficult to lose when a conference championship is at stake. It's magnified when we play as well as we did for 15 minutes and then go completely the other way. It takes the life out of you completely.
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).
Today we were smart enough (to win). We ran out of timeouts and we did a lot of good things the last two minutes that we needed to do. Everybody feels real good about it right now.
We put ourselves in position to win with two minutes left and we didn't do it. A lot of that responsibility falls on my shoulders.
What we did on Monday can really scar you for a long, long time. You are going to hear about it every minute of every single day from everybody. You have to have pretty tough skin to survive in this environment, and sometimes you don't come back from stuff like that very quickly.
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.
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.
That second 20 minutes was obviously like night and day. And that's a little bit worrisome for me. You always want to treat every game the same, treat every half the same. But I guess we had played pretty well up to this point and that was kind of the first bad 20 minutes that we've played in a while.
I don't know if our guys were taken aback by the first 20 minutes, but the second 20 minutes were like night and day. And that's a little bit worrisome for me. You want to play every game the same. That first half left a lot to be desired.
If you would have asked me how would I want it to go ... it went exactly the way I was hoping it would go. I was happy for the kids today because I?m not usually one to think in these terms, but if you do what we did on Monday anywhere else in the country, it?s not a big deal. But what we did on Monday can really scar you for a really long time if you play in this program because you?re going to hear about it every minute of every day, everywhere you go from everybody. You have to have pretty tough skin to survive in this environment. I was really proud of our guys to come back after the kind of week that we had to do what we did (Sunday).
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.