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're 18-2 and it doesn't feel that way. I don't know why. Maybe because you know how many games are really hard to play in and you just keep thinking, 'This is really hard.' If someone figures out what we're not good at, it's good night, Irene.
We can't run a play. We can't get into any kind of offense. For us, it was hard to find people to contribute. (Rutgers) got contributions from a lot of people.
When you lose this game, there's nothing worse. There's nothing worse because this is the game that gets you to the place where all good things can happen. This is the hardest hurdle to get over, because you need 12 more months then to get back here and you didn't put yourself in a position to win the national championship.
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.
She's very, very good under pressure. She doesn't get bothered by anything. That's why she's kind of hard for me to coach because when I talk to her, she don't listen because she's not affected by anything. I knew she was going to make the free throws.
She?s sneaky and she caught those guys a couple times. She?s not easy to guard, and I thought those guys did a pretty good job of making her work hard for everything.
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.
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.
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.
I think a team like ours, they need to be constantly reminded of how hard every game is. This isn't the old St. John's where you're up 25. Those days are behind us. They need to know that every team we play, whether it's Cincinnati, St. John's, it's going to be tough.
I think it was harder than all the other 12 put together. I thought our guys battled through a lot of stuff tonight. We played against a really good team that played their hearts out.