STORRS — There was a time, long after his wildest dreams had become real, when Geno Auriemma would have scoffed at the suggestion he would still be coaching the UConn women’s basketball team on March 23, 2024.
Surely, his 70th birthday would be spent on a golf course, or enjoying a glass of wine or a cigar, maybe touring his native Italy, pursing any of his well-known interests outside basketball.
“In a normal world, back when 60-65 was old, the absolute genius thing to do, when we won our fourth championship in a row with that gang and they all graduated, pffft, you ride off into the sunset altogether, waving goodbye,” Auriemma said. “That would have been the perfect scenario.
“But as soon as that season ended and you look around, you go, ‘Shoot, we can do that again. We’ve got pieces. ‘Phee, Lou, Gabby, we can do it again.’ And then you lose on that buzzer beater, and you’re kicking yourself about what you could have done differently. And then you’re in the cycle. You want to do it again, you want to do it again. And the reasons for doing it don’t make any sense, except, well, ‘if I told you we were going to win a national championship when I recruited you, then we have to do it.’
“And then you look up and you’re a few days away from turning 70 and you’re getting ready to sign a new contract. I can’t explain it.”
OK. Let’s back up. A new contract?
“We’ve been talking about it,” Auriemma said.
The break of daylight on Saturday will greet Geno Auriemma on his 70th birthday, with talks aiming at extending his contract to 2029. Those who assume he will retire when his current contract, paying roughly $3 million per year, expires after next season, stay until his latest superstar, Paige Bueckers, leaves and call it a career after a nice, round 40 years at UConn, may still be right. But the morning he turns 70, he will read his newspapers — not on a computer screen — and head to Gampel Pavilion to start the NCAA Tournament with a first-round game against Jackson State at 1 p.m.
He expects to have the same knots in his stomach he did before his first game against Iona in 1985. In his mind, he’ll conjure up half a dozen ways the Huskies could lose, though they are prohibitive favorites over a No. 14 seed, and that’s how he can tell his heart is still in the job he has had for 39 years. Though retirement is inevitable, and he and associate head coach Chris Dailey, who has been with him every step of the way, have the discussions, it is not yet in sight.
“Things change as you’re going along,” Auriemma said. “You know it has to happen, but when? That’s a hard question to answer.”
So backing up a little more, Auriemma’s Huskies won the most recent of the program’s 11 national championships in 2016, the year Breanna Stewart and her classmates left with four titles in four years. Auriemma, at 62, could have gone out on the pinnacle of pinnacles. He passed, and instead coached the Huskies, with Napheesa Collier, Katie Lou Samuelson, Gabby Williams, right back to the Final Four, lost an epic semifinal to Mississippi State in overtime, ending the 111-game winning streak on March 30, 2017. The quest for No. 12 has continued ever since, set back by similar losses and a myriad of injuries.
The long and short of it is this: Auriemma could sign a long contract and leave any time, or work week to week for years to come, but he intends to coach as long as he enjoys it and he will enjoy it as long as he can get the kind of players who make it so enjoyable. And just this week, during this break between the Big East and NCAA Tournaments, he was out trying to recruit more of them.
“Your contribution doesn’t have to be 25 points, but it has to be something.
Your number one contribution is the energy that you bring to what we’re doing.” — Geno Auriemma pic.twitter.com/JZJEAN5fGJ
— Prep Girls Hoops 🏀 (@PrepGirlsHoops) March 20, 2024
On Wednesday, Auriemma arrived at his office in the Werth Center at 10 a.m. and sat down with the Hartford Courant for 90 minutes, a sweeping, archetypal stream of consciousness over coffee, exploring all that has happened in his American Dream of a life, 70 trips around the sun, and what may be next, for him and the UConn program.
“If a kid asks me, ‘How do I know you’re going to be here four years?’ Now, you say, ‘How do I know you’re going to be here four years?'” Auriemma said. “I might be here longer than you. … The coach who told you to ask me that question, if I leave tomorrow, they will apply for this job. I don’t care if they’re 27 or 77. So what are we talking about here?”
From big brother to ‘Gramps’
Auriemma was just a few years older than the high school freshmen at Bishop McDevitt High School outside Philadelphia where he was helping out coach Jim Foster, who asked him to show them some drills. “I’m 21, I had no interest in coaching, I had less interest in coaching 14-year-old girls,” he said.
But he showed them a few things and saw the looks on their faces when they succeeded.
“They were so happy that they got some things right, and I was like, ‘You just helped these kids do something they didn’t think they could do.’ And it was the coolest thing. I thought, let me see if it stays like this. And it did. So girls can experience the same things we experienced when we were playing, and I had never looked at it that way.”
On it went, the road leading to high schools and colleges, finally to UConn to be the coach of a program that appeared headed nowhere in a sport far from the mainstream. This week, speaking to the Middlesex Chamber of Commerce, he told the crowd it was no exaggeration to say there were more people in the ballroom at the Sheraton in Rocky Hill than there were at the Hartford Civic Center, as it was then called, for his first game. For the late afternoon start to a doubleheader with the men’s team, the yellow-clad security folks and players’ parents were about the only people in the building. The first Final Four came in 1991, the championships started coming in ’95, and today the arenas are full.
In his early 30s at UConn, he was still at roughly big brother age to his players. Then he became old enough to be their father. Now, players like Bueckers call him “gramps.” And yet some things don’t change. There are moments when two current freshmen at UConn can turn back the clock for him.
“There are interactions with your players that remind you of why you got into this in the first place,” Auriemma said. “When those stop happening, it’s time to move on. They keep coming in. KK Arnold, perfect example. She’s a freshman and she acts, carries herself and treats me like she’s some little kid at the playground and she just wants to have fun. No matter what happens, no matter how serious, what I say or what I do, that kid is in the playground having the time of her life and I’m getting to enjoy it. They’re old enough to be my grandkids, and it’s fun being around them.
“… Ashlynn Shade is one of the most cautious, analytical people I’ve ever been around. Takes no chances, no risks. So I’m always on her butt. ‘Are you kidding me? That ball was in the air from Tuesday to Wednesday, and you just watched it land in the player’s hands that you’re guarding and then you’re going to guard the kid. In the world that I come from, you steal the ball and you don’t have to guard the kid.’ This happened in a game and I would get really mad at her. Then we come out of the timeout, and there she goes flying from someplace, goes in, gets the steal, gets a layup, and then she turns around. The look on her face coming back? You can’t describe it. Like one of my grandkids at the amusement park. Things like that still get me excited.”
The layers outside the core of the onion, to use Auriemma’s imagery, have changed. Like nearly all coaches, Auriemma struggles to navigate the impact of name, image, likeness revenue for players, and the ability to transfer easily. The advent of the internet and social media floods players with information, he believes, so it becomes harder for them to retain what he teaches. He finds himself having to go over things over and over.
“But the kids, at their core, are the same,” he said. “They’re still 18 or 19 years old and want exactly what you and I wanted when we were that age. We’ve told them, ‘You still want it, but you can get it a different way.’ Go buy a car. Either you have the money to pay for it or you don’t, they don’t lower the price for you. And that’s what we’ve done to these kids, we’ve lowered the price of things, so we’ve cheated them in some ways of the kind of experience that makes you grow, that makes you find out, ‘How tough am I, really?’
“… Paige Bueckers and Nika Muhl were just like the freshmen I had in 1990. I coach the heck out of Paige every day in practice, I’m on her, and if I don’t, she asks, ‘What’s wrong?’ There are still kids who want to come here because they want to be coached that way. And if you get those kinds of kids, you have a chance to enjoy coaching, still.”
Success … and succession
This season, Auriemma, a Naismith Hall of Famer since 2006, passed 1,200 victories. Among men’s or women’s basketball coaches, only Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer, who started eight years earlier, has a few more. As they have been natural rivals for decades, from the success of their programs and the competition for recruits, there has been much discussion about who will retire first, and thus conceded the title of “winningest coach.”
Auriemma shakes his head, smiles, winks. He does not expect to retire with that distinction.
“I have a number no one will ever have,” he whispered, glancing at the 11 championship trophies with the nets draped around them that line a wall of his office.
Actually, he has quite a few numbers that are unlikely to be matched, a winning percentage better than 88%, a 111-game winning streak, 14 consecutive Final Fours and a run of 30 years without losing back-to-back games. The Huskies, though injuries have them down to eight available players, seven for the Big East tournament, are 29-5. If someone does win more than 11 NCAA championships, he believes, they won’t win them all in one place.
UConn, ranked 10th in the AP poll, and a No. 3 seed in the NCAA Tournament, doesn’t quite face the same expectations for this March Madness. The national focus is on others, undefeated South Carolina, defending champ LSU, Caitlyn Clark and Iowa, in a tournament considered more competitive and compelling than ever before.
Auriemma remembered that when he was an assistant at Virginia, AD Dick Schultz told coaches the goal wasn’t to win the national championship, or the ACC, every year, this was not realistic, but to “be in the conversation” every year. Be in the hunt, and when things break right championships will come.
At UConn, Auriemma has created an environment where being in the conversation isn’t enough.
“At some places, that’s cause for a raise every year, at other places, the Yankees, the Red Sox, in this part of the world, it’s a little bit more than that, ‘just being in the conversation,’ ” he said. “That conversation better not last long, it better be, ‘You did it,’ because the pressure is never-ending. You reach a point where you have to make a decision. Does it bother me? Can I still deal with it? Can I completely not care about any of it, and if we win, we win.”
This will be his bequest to a successor. Several of his former players and coaches have gone on to be head coaches, including Morgan Valley, Tonya Cardoza and Jamelle Elliot, all back on his staff. Jen Rizzotti coached at UHart and is now president of the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun, Shea Ralph at Vanderbilt and Carla Berube at Princeton have coached their teams into the NCAA Tournament. There is no shortage of candidates on his coaching tree to succeed Auriemma, but when he brings it up to former players, he says, he usually hears, “Not me! … Nope.”
“The first quality (it will take) is knowing you’re going to fail and not being surprised by it,” Auriemma said. “And not expect to have the same success right away that we’re enjoying right now and understand that and accept that. If your expectation is that you’re going to come here and win a national championship right away, you might do it, heck, you might win the next five in a row, but be ready, if you don’t, to constantly being compared to what used to be here. Totally unfair, but whoever comes here will have to deal with that. They may be better than I am, but the moment they do something that doesn’t work, ‘Oh, he would have never done that,’ yeah because they’ll forget how many times I messed something up.”
Auriemma said he would be willing to give the UConn hierarchy a few names to consider, but he does not want to pick his successor or even be involved in the process.
“The search should be worldwide,” he said. “Worldwide. It’s going to take somebody who has tremendous confidence in themselves, has a track record of winning or maybe you want to start all over and hire a young person and there is something to be said for that. Some people hire from within and always keep it ‘in the family,’ that has worked some places, and it has failed miserably. I don’t think you automatically say, ‘We’re staying in-house.’ That would be a tremendous mistake. Don’t limit yourself to that, and don’t ask me who the next coach should be. How do you know I’m doing it for the right reasons?”
Idle thoughts
Auriemma has dropped a few hints over the years. He does not like lengthy “farewell tours,” so would be more apt to make his announcement after a season. He doesn’t plan to be a frequent presence at UConn, or once he goes, get the itch to make a comeback.
“It won’t involve me sitting around missing this,” he said. “It won’t involve me having an office in the building. It won’t involve people watching me watch the next coach. So there will be a time when I will do nothing, except get up when I want to get up, play golf when I want to play golf, travel when I feel like traveling. I’m very, very good at doing nothing. When I’m doing something, I’m in it 100 percent, but I’m very good at doing nothing … until I’m too bored to be doing nothing.
“… I’m intrigued by a lot of things, always have been. I’d like to be part of a three-man broadcast booth with Bill Raftery, be part of the oldest team in TV history. Back to the old days with By Saam, Bill Campbell and Richie Ashburn (calling Phillies games on the radio).”
He has his restaurant interests, among them Cafe Aura in Manchester, and his line of pasta sauces based on his mother’s recipe.
Auriemma would still like to teach and coach young coaches.
“A few of us have been talking about putting together a group that can educate, teach, mentor coaches around the country,” he said. “There already is a model for how to do this, and it’s the soccer model. Maybe they got it from overseas. If you want to coach 14-year-olds, you need a license to coach 14-year-olds. You want to coach 18-year-olds? Now you need another license, 22-year-olds? Another license. In basketball, you just have to have enough money to own an AAU team.”
He envisions an academy, “like an IMG for coaches” where the best coaches train and mentor coaches to work with youth, high school and college male and female basketball.
“Back in the day, working camps, that’s how you got a job,” Auriemma said. “You worked a couple of weeks there and every coach in the country came to recruit and watch you work. That doesn’t happen anymore. There has to be a place where coaches can learn from the best coaches. ‘How do you teach this?’ Where is the place where they teach coaches how to coach, how to teach, and treat them more like teachers? Coaching is taking someone who is really, really good at what they do and making them better. Teaching someone how to teach and how to handle all the things that are coming. College coaches will say, ‘I’m a genius at X’s and O’s.’ That’s about 10 percent of the job. What about the other stuff? I think there’s a real need. People who want to coach or are in coaching need training and they’re not getting it.”
Turn the page
Auriemma was 17 when Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band released the single “Turn The Page” in 1971, and he became fascinated with the song. It’s always on his playlists. It describes the life of a rock star. “I wondered what it would be like to live in that world,” Auriemma said.
A few years ago, he met Seger, in his mid-70s, backstage before a concert at Mohegan Sun. “He looks a lot different than what you see on his album covers, a little goatee, mostly gray, just a regular guy having a conversation. And then he comes out on stage and the lights went on and, bam, he’s Bob Seeger, the rock star,” Auriemma said, his eyes lighting up.
Seger called out “Coach Geno” and dedicated a song to him. Auriemma thought for a moment of how crazy that was, or how crazy it was that he was able to take his mother, who remembered taking candy tossed by the American soldiers who liberated Italy during World War II, to the White House to meet President Barack Obama. And he thought about the moment he found himself on a dark road in Winder, Georgia, in the middle of nowhere, he thought, asking what he was doing there, but knowing he had to convince Olivia Nelson-Ododa to come to UConn. He did.
And along the way, it has dawned on him. He does live in that world, he has been going from town to town, arena to arena to put on his show. A lot of performers go on what they say is their final tour but then do another. “And you go,” he said, “because you don’t know if that will be your last chance to see them.”
He, too, no longer looks like the guy on his album covers, but on the day he turns 70, the lights will come on at Gampel Pavilion, the full house will be loud, and there Auriemma will go, up on the stage, playin’ the star again. He will keep turning the pages, but he is not ready to close the book. Not yet.
“As long as the lights go on,” he said, softly. “… I’m like a moth. … Going into the light.”
