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've got some good basketball left in us we haven't played yet. There's a lot that still has to come together for us and hopefully it will be Monday night.
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).
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.
Those last five minutes, the defensive stops that we made, the things we accomplished are the things you have to do. I think we made the plays. Offensively we got the ball where we wanted to get it. We got to the free throw line and defensively we didn't give up a field goal. That is a far cry from last Monday (against Rutgers). That is the nature of the game. You get it right and you feel great. You get it wrong you feel lousy.
I think today was another reminder for our team that we can be as good as we were on Monday but when we're not all on the same page and not properly focused where we need to be, we can be just like anyone else. I'm hoping that games like this remind us, because once you get into the NCAA Tournament, you play a game like this, you're going to go home.
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).
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.
The goal is not to play Rutgers three times, the goal is to win the Big East championship. It would be disrespectful to West Virginia to think like that. We set out to get ourselves in position to win a championship and put ourselves in the same position we put ourselves in last Monday (a 48-42 loss at Rutgers) and try to make the outcome a little different.
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.
I've seen (Strother) go through stretches where nothing's gone in, but she had that one stretch where she made everything. It all evens itself out, I think. I think all she needs is a couple to drop. ... She'll come around.
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.
The time she broke her ankle standing still. Do you know how hard that is to do?
I still don't think we can guard her. But what you can do is make her have to guard you. We made it so she had to defend in the lane.