Ascending the Summitt
UConn’s Auriemma reflective as he nears coaching milestone set by his rival and friend
Geno Auriemma is on the verge of history. Again.
The UConn coach’s next win — likely Saturday against Providence at Gampel Pavilion — will be the 1,098th of his Hall of Fame career, matching him with Tennessee legend Pat Summitt for second on the all-time list in women’s basketball. He’s currently seven behind Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer, who surpassed Summitt last month.
Recently, when a member of his program reminded Auriemma of this, he sort of shrugged his shoulders.
And then he started thinking in broader terms.
“It did make me think about it,” Auriemma, 66, said Tuesday on Zoom, “about how if you’re around long enough, how the world spins.
It spins you in a lot of different directions, but one thing’s for sure. What was old becomes new and what is new becomes old. “They say that all the time.” More specifically, Auriemma, now in his 36th season at UConn, started thinking about his late nemesis, Summitt, and the extremes by which both were measured as their programs rose to fabled heights. Auriemma’s won a record 11 NCAA titles, one more than famed UCLA men’s coach John Wooden and three more than Summitt, who collected her last championship in 2008.
“Back when Pat, God bless her, was alive and coaching and winning championships, everybody in America would talk about Pat in two ways,” Auriemma said. “One, ‘Man, I admire her so much, she
wins so much, she does it the right way. She has the respect of everybody for everything.’ Then you had another part of the population that would go, ‘Man, I want to beat her butt so bad, I want to beat Tennessee so bad. They roll into the Final Four like they own the (darn) place. Who the (heck) do they think they are?’
“And then you go around, you go around, you go around, and you wake up one morning and you read, ‘Ah, (darn) Geno Auriemma, he thinks he’s so funny, they roll into the Final Four like they own the (darn) place. I don’t care who wins the national championship as long as it’s not them.’
“Then I started to laugh and I go, ‘Oh my God.’ We have reached a point where you have people admire what you’ve done, and you have the other side who don’t want you to win anymore.”
Auriemma, who was 4-0 in national championship games and 13-9 overall against Summitt between 1995 and 2007, says she handled that outside noise better than he ever has.
Though their rivalry ended on a contentious note, with Summitt accusing Auriemma of cheating in his recruitment of Maya Moore, the pair patched up their long-running feud later in Summitt’s life. They shared a warm embrace at the 2012 Final Four in Denver, months after Summitt announced she had been diagnosed with early-onset dementia.
Summitt died in 2016 at the age of 64.
“She had a lot more re
strain and a lot more sense than I do, and that’s probably what I miss about her,” he said. “She was able to look past all the trivial stuff and concentrate on the big stuff. Maybe someday I’ll grow into that role.”
Auriemma has downplayed his pursuit of Summitt, saying it’d hardly be discussed if he were chasing somebody else. “We’d be talking about, ‘ Hey, you’re not that far from Tara,’ ” he said.
But, as is still the case, nothing is insignificant when it comes to Geno and Pat, Pat and Geno.
“The significance of (matching Summitt) is not small to him,” said Jen Rizzotti, who led UConn to its first national title in 1995, a 70-64 victory over the Lady Vols. “She set the standard for what he wanted to be and what we wanted to be. That will not be taken for granted moving forward.”