What Geno Auriemma said after UConn’s championship win over South Carolina
Connecticut won its 12th women’s basketball championship on Sunday.
The Huskies defeated defending champion South Carolina, 82-59, to cap a dominant postseason. After the game, Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma addressed the media at press conference.
Here are some of the highlights from Auriemma:
On getting Paige Bueckers a title and getting back on top for first time in nine years
“Being honest, I think there was a big part of my inner circle of people that I trust that we were hoping that after the Stewy fourth in a row that I should have called it a day back then. That would have been apropos, I guess — ride off into the sunset with Stewy and Tuck and Moriah and those guys.
But when you make the decision you’re not finished yet, and then three, four years go by and people start telling you that UConn is not UConn anymore and it’s somebody else’s turn. And then five years go by and six years go by and seven years go by — it’s not like it was extra motivation, but it just happened to coincide, the last five years, with the pandemic, the bubble, the injuries.
And I just kept thinking, you know, I kind of owe it to these people to kind of let me see if we can take a whole team, what could happen, because these people that have been playing against us for the last seven, eight years have not played a University of Connecticut team, yet beating UConn always seemed like the national championship to them. For us it always seemed like, if we ever got a chance to get healthy, this could be pretty good.
So it coincided with Paige’s journey. So my journey became hers in so many words. Who’s to say after she won her first — if we won her sophomore year, her second year at Connecticut, we won the national championship, I feel, okay, I lived up to my promise; she got a national championship? But because it didn’t happen, it was just almost like a crusade on our coaching staff’s part to let’s do this, let’s do this, let’s do this.
Who knew it would turn out like this? But I started to trust in them. And when I tell you it’s really out of your hands, it really is true. All of this is in the hands of the players who are playing. And they made it all worthwhile today.
It’s probably the most emotional one, like I said, that I’ve had maybe since — I don’t know, really, really emotional, 2000 — I can name — ‘95 was pretty emotional, obviously. 2000 in Philly, in front of my mom and stuff. And in 2002 with Sue and that crew; and now. Then D’s senior year and Stewy’s senior year. Those were probably the most, because of what was involved. And this one had as much if not more involved. I was pretty emotional when the game ended.
How does this year’s team rank in legacy of UConn women’s basketball
I don’t know. Usually those things are decided by other people who write what it means. I do think that each championship is a building block, and the legacy is all those blocks placed on top of each other.
And I don’t know that one — well the bottom one holds everything up, but the first one — I don’t think any other one means more to the legacy.
Maybe what this one means is that there were a lot of people that didn’t think it would ever happen. There were a lot of people that hoped it would never happen. I’m glad that we were able to get to that spot that Connecticut has occupied — not that we had to win a championship, but in the last 30 years I don’t know that any program’s meant more to their sport than what UConn has meant to women’s basketball, so I feel good about that.
How much longer will you continue to coach?
Again, we maybe talked about this recently. Yes, we all feel our age at some point. We don’t like to admit that we’re older because we still act younger because of the people that we’re dealing with.
I know a lot of my friends that are my age that haven’t done what I’ve done with who I’ve done it with, and they look way older, act way older because they’ve lost the ability to be a kid because they’re not around kids.
So, yeah, I may be 71 number-wise, but I think otherwise I’m more able to do stuff with those young people because I’m around them every day and they rub off on me.
Does that mean I can do this for another X number of years? No, because, you know, wine is good for you, too, and if you’re around it all the time, after a while, you wake up and you go that was really bad, I had too much fun.
So these kids are fun. But there is going to come a time when the fun doesn’t eliminate how hard it is to do this job. This job is really hard to do.
I almost equated this one with coaching the Olympic team. Okay? If you know anything about coaching the Olympic team, it’s a four-year cycle.
You’ve got to win a world championship first. And then you’ve got to win a gold medal. And it takes four years for that whole thing to evolve.
And if I were to tell you the number of people who work every day, not just in Colorado Springs, to win a gold medal, that you feel like if you don’t win it they have to wait four more years to have that opportunity.
The incredible amount of pressure and obligation that you have and my job has become that at UConn, that it’s more of an obligation to do what they expect me to do as opposed to any fame and fortune that’s going to come my way. Although my AD doesn’t know that yet.
