Winning an old habit
STORRS, Conn. — Great isn’t good enough for Geno Auriemma, and no one on his UConn women’s basketball team is too gifted to get better.
Woe to any player who thinks differently.
For Auriemma, the bar always gets set a notch higher.
“It’s never what they think it’s going to be. It’s never as easy as they think it’s going to be,” he said. “Nor should it be.”
Top-ranked UConn, with its seven national titles and four perfect seasons, is one step away from basketball history: the 88-game winning streak set by John Wooden’s UCLA men’s team from 1971-74.
The Huskies, who have not lost since April 6, 2008, in the NCAA tournament semifinals, can catch the Bruins when they play No. 11 Ohio State at Madison Square Garden Sunday. Then they would go for the record against No. 15 Florida State Tuesday.
“You almost have no way of answering the questions anymore about how the whole thing comes to be,” Auriemma said during a recent interview in his office, where the walls are covered with pictures of his former players. “We’re fortunate. We’ve got kids that work really, really hard at what we ask them to do.”
Auriemma can be charming and affable, and his quips make him a media favorite. But he knows there are people who think he’s a jerk.
He may have spent the last 26 years in Connecticut, but he remains a Philly guy to the core. He’s sarcastic and has no edit button, saying whatever is on his mind no matter who it might offend or how it will be perceived — a trait that may have played a part in his cool relationships with Tennessee coach Pat Summitt and UConn men’s coach Jim Calhoun. Try as he might, he can’t help but sprinkle his conversations with cusswords.
He is attentive to even the smallest detail, almost obsessively so. He doesn’t like his players to wear headphones while traveling because he doesn’t want them blocking out the world. He doesn’t like them to be distracted during the national anthem, so they line up shortest to tallest, identical in their shorts and long-sleeved shirts, standing ramrod straight with legs apart and hands behind their backs.
On the sidelines, he rants and raves, even while his Huskies are in the midst of yet another rout. He finds flaws — lots of them — and takes almost perverse pleasure in pointing them out.
Asked what her team could take away from its recent 32-point loss to Connecticut, Marquette coach Terri Mitchell said: “When we tell you to do the little things in practice, THIS is the difference between being good and being great. Those little things are the difference.”
And he drives them. Oh, does he drive them. Games of seven-on-five in practice. Forcing them to play against bigger, stronger male students he’s rounded up on campus. Endless drills to hone skills players thought they had mastered in junior high.
“The way they practice is the way they play. That’s why they’re the best team in the country,” former Huskies center Kara Wolters said. “He does not accept walking. He does not accept not talking. You run to the end of the line, you sprint like it is a privilege to be on the basketball court every day.
“It doesn’t matter that they have five freshmen; they’re playing Connecticut basketball. They practice that hard every day, and Geno expects that from the first person off the bench to the last person off the bench,” said Wolters, who played on UConn’s 1995 NCAA title team and was national player of the year two years later. “If you can survive and beat Geno mentally in practice every day, games are easy.”
