Giving Geno his due
I didn’t used to like Geno Auriemma. I’ve sat through a few press conferences during Final Fours that I’ve covered and his remarks always seemed a bit snarky. The rest of the room seemed to find him humorous, but to me he seemed too much like a good ol boy. Admittedly, my judgement, was clouded by my allegiance to Pat Summitt, the Tennessee Lady Vol’s coach and Geno’s arch-rival for much of the 1990s and 2000s. She never forgave him for luring Maya Moore away from Tennessee back in 2006, and she canceled the incredibly popular in-season, annual game between the two powerhouses of women’s basketball.
The UConn/Tennessee rivalry was the best thing about women’s basketball back in the mid 1990s and into the 2000s. I mean there were other teams worth watching. Tara VanDerveer’s Stanford Cardinal were perennial tournament mainstays, but they only bumped UConn or Tennessee off the podium twice in the years between 1995 and 2012.
Summitt’s teams won six national championships between 1987 and 1998. She won two more (in 2007 and 2008) before early onset Alzheimer’s cut short her illustrious career in 2012. When she retired, she held the most career wins of any college basketball coach with 1,098.
Meanwhile, Geno’s Huskies won their first national championship in 1995, but began their streak of 11 national championships in 2000. In the heyday of their rivalry, Tennessee/UConn games were must-see TV. In fact, they were among the few college women’s hoop games that were nationally televised.
To think that Geno was stacking the deck obviously bothered me, even though I was always a big fan of his star players: Moore, Diana Taurasi Sue Bird, Rebecca Lobo, Jen Rizzoti, and Brianna Stewart. But Pat’s gone now, and Tara just retired. Geno keeps chugging along and just became the winningest college basketball coach with 1217 wins and counting to pass VanDerveer’s 1216.
I really wanted to begrudge Geno every win since Summitt retired. I wanted to point out that UConn’s conference is woefully uncompetitive compared to Summitt’s SEC. But in the past few years I’ve come to admire Geno’s ability to keep putting out competitive teams, even when those teams were decimated by injuries that would have crippled most teams. On the occasion of Auriemma’s breaking the total wins record, Sue Bird had this to say: “The thing that has always stuck out to me is this ability to not get complacent, to not get bored,” Bird told USA TODAY Sports. “To try to constantly achieve this level of perfection at every practice, every game — when you look back at 40 years of that, it’s pretty incredible to never have slippage, to never have a bad day in terms of your standards, especially when human nature is to get more relaxed.”
What Bird is describing is a tough taskmaster who has somehow managed to maintain that edge. But there’s obviously more to Geno than that. What really turned the tide for me was realizing how much his players think of him, despite how hard he pushes them. The relationships he continues to have with them long after they graduate says a lot about his character as a coach, and it explains his longevity better than anything else. A great example of this was the time Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi made fun of Geno’s resemblance to the curmudgeonly character from the Pixar movie, Up, on their Bird and Taurasi ESPN show. Later, Geno posed with a photo of his “Up”-like countenance and seemed to enjoy being the butt of the joke. I can’t imagine Pat Summitt doing that.
So here’s to Geno, who has outlasted the best of them. His teams have come up short the past few years as women’s college basketball continues its march towards parity. This year, any of five or six teams could replace South Carolina as national champions and UConn is definitely one of them. I’ll probably be rooting for the Huskies to win it all, just one more time…. And that’s something I didn’t think I’d ever say.