UConn Basketball HC Geno Auriemma previews North Carolina game
UConn Women’s Basketball Head Coach Geno Auriemma met with the media on Thursday afternoon to preview his upcoming NCAA Tournament Sweet Sixteen matchup against North Carolina on Friday afternoon.
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UConn Basketball HC Geno Auriemma Transcript
As a courtesy to everyone in the room, please silence your cell phones. When asking a question, please state your name and media affiliation each time. And for those joining via Zoom, please use the raise hand function.
We’ll take questions from the room first and go to Zoom as time permits. Please note that recording press conferences on cell phones or cameras is not permitted. Coach, we’ll start with your opening statement.
Thank you. Yeah, there’s not really a lot to say other than, you know, you, you know, you play, what, 36 games, you know, and you try to put yourself in this situation as often as you can and, you know, you know you’re gonna play a really good team and, you know, just looking at my players, I think they’re really excited about playing. It’s our first time, you know, here in Fort Worth and the arena is great and I’m sure, you know, the fans will be great.
I think every team that’s here knows that, you know, this weekend is probably the biggest weekend of the year. I mean, I know everybody talks about the Final Four and all that, but getting there is a lot harder than what happens after you get there, I think. Roger Cleveland from Hearst Media.
Geno, you guys routinely either lead the country in assists or in the top five. Is there a common thread among all those teams that makes you such a great passing team and an assist team and is there something that makes this team stand out to the point where it could break your record? I think a lot of it has to do with the philosophy that we have that’s been in place since I first started coaching, you know. Our 88-89 team went to the Final Four.
I’m sorry, our 90-91 team went to the Final Four and we have been playing a five-out kind of game where it all relied on passing and moving without the ball and so that’s been our way of playing for as long as I can remember and when we’re out recruiting, you know, we’re trying to recruit kids that can pass, want to pass, and then we spend a lot of time working on it. Some years it’s better than others, you know. This year, you know, I think it’s worked out, you know, pretty well.
It’s always better when you’ve got a couple big kids that can pass, you know, like we do. So I think it’s just our philosophy, you know. We don’t play a lot of one-on-one basketball, although we do, but that’s not who we are and I think it’s reflected in the stats.
Coach Mack Engel, Fort Worth Star-Telegram. This is a general college sports question for you. Do you think women’s sports, in its growth and its evolution and its expansion, is in a place now where it can go on its own without Title IX legislation? You know, it appears to me that at the big conferences level, I think Title IX legislation is probably over.
I don’t know that when you say we’re allocating $20.5 million that they’re going, yeah, well, you know, women’s basketball is going to get the same amount as football and men’s basketball. So I think the Title IX legislation over the last couple of years is pretty much out the window. I’m sure there are some schools that are trying really hard to stay with that in terms of numbers, you know, scholarship opportunities for people, but when it comes time to funding and putting money into those programs that would make you believe that it’s the same, I don’t see that as much anymore as I did in the beginning.
I think most of the NCAA laws have gone out the window as the conferences have kind of consolidated the power that they have over the NCAA for the most part. And the way the women’s game has grown, it’s grown at a lot of places, and those places where it’s grown have got to keep pushing for more because I don’t know that we’re quite there yet, you know? Like, for instance, people talk about playing neutral sites in the first and second round, and my question would be why? Baseball doesn’t do it. Even football doesn’t do it now.
No other school, no other team on campus, maybe, I don’t know, there might be one or two sports on campus, plays in neutral courts or neutral sites in the first round, second round, maybe there are people, I don’t know, because I don’t think we’re there yet. Maybe we will be. Maybe if the first and second rounds were always held at the same places, maybe.
So we still got a ways to go, and unfortunately it’s going to have to be done through the way the conference commissioners and the way the athletic directors decide that they want to keep funding the sport. That’s the only way. Hi, Gino.
Alexa Philpou, ESPN. In your two years of working with Sarah Strong so far, what have you learned about the most effective way to coach her and what she responds to the best? Like most really, really good players, they want to be left alone for the most part. Just let me play, and then they really like when you get after them.
When you leave them alone and then they don’t do what you want them to do, then you can really get after them, and she loves that. Like she loves, like all the good players I’ve had, she really enjoys being coached. She’s not one of these kids that hangs her head ever, you know.
She’s very competitive and has tremendous pride, and it’s somewhat different for me now. It’s kind of refreshing. We had dinner with Paige last night and listened to her speak.
It reminded me of how much those five years took off of my life, listening to the things that she says, and the interesting thing is I lived through it with Diana. They’re the only two that put me through that. Sarah thinks the same things.
She just doesn’t say them, and we catch her every once in a while saying under her breath. So right now, I’m kind of enjoying this phase. Junior year, senior year, it might not be the same, but she enjoys being coached.
She enjoys being right. She’s just like every other great player I’ve ever coached. Maggie Vannone, CT Insider, right here.
It looked like Morgan Shelley was a participant in practice today. Just can you confirm when she was cleared and what was taking her so long in her journey to get back? I think in January, you kind of expected her not to be available the rest of the year. She’s not available, so I wasn’t wrong.
She’s just able to do some, a little bit more workouts. It’s part of her rehab. And why? That’s a doctor question, not for me, but it’s just taking a lot longer than we anticipated.
Yeah, that’s the best I can tell you. Hey Coach, Ansley Gavlak, USA Today. As a follow-up on the previous question, how have you seen the NCAA tournament specifically change in the past five or so years? Have I seen a change? Well, we never had to do media at 730 in the morning.
We never had to have shoot around at 530 in the morning. We never had to have a half an hour on the court. The players used to be the main thing back in the day, and now that’s all changed.
You know, the idea of having eight, that the committee has to run a tournament with eight teams on one site and try to get all eight of them to actually prepare for the biggest games, just makes no sense at all. And the game is growing. As we talked, the game is exploding.
The game has changed so much, and yet half the country doesn’t have an ability to go drive to a game and watch a game in person. So yeah, it’s changed. Some of it in terms of the media attention, the way the TV networks have decided to broadcast way more games, the way the media, how they’re covering the games, the, you know, the level of interest in the NCAA tournament, you know.
But there’s still things that I think, as we experience these growing pains, are gonna have to be kind of re-evaluated and go back to what makes the most sense to get our players, everybody’s players, feeling like it’s about them still. And again, in an era where financially you have to make everything work, that seems to be the number one question, or the number one concern that everyone has. How do we make this work financially? You know, I’m okay with that.
How do we do that and still make it work for the players as well. Time for one final question. Andrew Adelson with ESPN.
You mentioned you didn’t think the game was there yet for neutral sites in the first and second rounds, but Felicia made comments after the game the other night that kind of went viral and once again sparked that conversation. What did you think of what she had to say after the game, obviously, against you guys? Well, I didn’t take it as she doesn’t want neutral sites, she doesn’t want our site, right? She’s upset about being in the Connecticut site that many times over the course of how many years. So, I understand where she’s coming from, you know.
I’ve not been on any of those committees, but you keep falling in the 8-9 game, 7-8-9 game, you’re gonna end up getting a one or two seed most of the time. Why you keep getting the same, that’s a question that I don’t have the answer to, but if you would tell me that we could guarantee that every first and second round game, no matter where we played it, would be sold out, then I would say let’s do it, but the reality is they wouldn’t be unless you have them in certain places and then people would complain that so-and-so gets an unfair advantage by being close to home. Like, Albany, we used to bid on the regionals all the time and because we were the number one seed so many times, we were sent to Albany and people would go, that’s not fair.
Well, it is fair because we’re following the process. So, there is no true how to do it, but again, I would say if you’re just gonna have neutral sites just to have neutral sites, again, I would point to every other sport on campus doesn’t do that except men’s basketball, but that’s because they can’t. So, I don’t have, I don’t have the solution to that at all.
Although, I do think, though, that there are places in the country that would support those first two round games, provided there were local teams involved, because that seems to be the way it goes, you know, but we’re here now where, you know, every regional is a sellout that didn’t used to exist in the past. I think first-order businesses spread the regionals to four regions. Otherwise, don’t call them regionals anymore.
Call them destinations. The word regional means you’re in regions of the country. So, I’d like to go back to that before we go back to the other thing.
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