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
This time of year, a team's systems don't matter. It's individual players that end up deciding the outcomes of the games.
This time of the year, it's individual players who make the difference. Your style of play, your system as a program gets you to this point and then individual players end up deciding the outcome of the game. Ann stepped up and made some huge plays.
Fair or unfair, at Connecticut it's not good enough just to win. There's a perception that if we don't go to the Final Four, it's a bad season. I want the players to understand that the one constant in our program, is that we want to make sure we play hard and have fun.
There are a lot of players who score a lot of points and they get them whether their team is winning or losing. Ann's always been more about timing and not about how many.
No one ever talks about our defense. Our defense has always been good. But when you have great offensive players like I've coached the last 15 years, it's hard to concentrate on our defense. But our defense has been pretty good.
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 is assembling a really great cast here. She is taking young players and playing them. Once they are older they will know how to play together. Pitt accomplished more (yesterday) then we did.
Obviously in the long term, as the season wears on, there's no way you can be as good a team without someone who is, I think, one of the best five players in the league. Meg can put up 20 points every night, and that has to be comforting. But this West Virginia team is still one of the best that I've seen. That team is very difficult to play against.
Right now, it seems like Will has made a commitment to herself to be one of the better players at her position in our league. And certainly it's not beyond the realm of possibilities for will. If you think about it, she's got all the ingredients.
There are a lot of good players back, a lot of good teams. I'm anxious to see how this plays out.
I think players sometimes don?t understand fully the amount of responsibility on their shoulders. As a senior, you have to take on that responsibility every day -- practice, games, travel, locker room, you name it. I think in the Big East tournament, they really, really, really did that. They took it to heart and made sure all the little things that lead to winning were taken care of. I really admire them for that.
Having a senior athletic enough that she can play inside and outside and can move some of their players away from the basket, not having that allowed them to pack it in. It made it difficult for us to get anything going, but at the same time, Pitt's defense and how physical they were had more to do with it than Turner not playing.
We want everybody to be one of the top players in the league, and it's not out of the realm of possibly to do that. We've got all the ingredients. It's just a matter of doing it.
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.