Geno passes Summitt
UConn beats Providence as Auriemma becomes No. 2 in wins.
In a week, a month, a year full of uncertainty and upheaval, Saturday afternoon was a reminder that one thing remains true no matter the unusual circumstances: UConn’s Geno Auriemma is one of the greatest coaches the sport of basketball has ever seen.
Behind an 87-50 win over Providence, Auriemma tied Tennessee legend
Pat Summitt for No. 2 on the sport’s all-time wins list with 1,098 victories. He can surpass
Summitt’s mark — which stood for eight years as a women’s basketball record before Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer broke it last month — Wednesday against Seton Hall.
In typical Auriemma fashion, he deflected attention away from the milestone following the game.
“Right now the only number that matters to me is 13,” the coach said, referring to the minimum number of games needed to qualify for the NCAA Tournament this season.
“I would like to think that if you’ve done something for 37 years, whatever it is, that you’re going to have some milestones,” he continued. “And if you’re fortunate enough, you have some pretty important milestones. And if you are lucky enough to be surrounded by the people that I’ve been surrounded with, they’re actually
with, they are actually meaningful milestones. I’m sure someday I’ll be able to look back on all those and appreciate it when it’s all over.”
Auriemma’s victory total is another entry into a long list of arithmetic that serves either as the most basic or most comprehensive guide in trying to appreciate his career.
He has won 11 national championships and reached the Final Four 20 times. He has coached 14 Olympians at UConn, eight national players of the year.
He’s won two Olympic Gold medals as coach of the U.S. National team. He has a record 88.5 winning percentage in 1,240 games with just 142 losses, and his teams have authored winning streaks of 111 and 90 games.
It’s all astounding to the point that any discussions about Auriemma’s legacy could include more numbers than a math book, if needed.
Those numbers are important and worth celebrating, but they aren’t everything. They are dots to connect eras along a path of transformation for a program and a sport.
Is there a number to assign to Auriemma’s impact on basketball, or a way to count the number of people in this state who, winter after winter, feel so connected to him, his program and his players?
Who knows how many victories Summitt, who retired after the 2011-12 season and died in 2016 at age 64, would have accumulated if not for early-onset Alzheimer’s.
Who’s to say Auriemma’s journey, whenever it ends, should be viewed any differently if he ends up with 1,100 or 1,300 victories, or with 11 or 14 national championships, or with any more or fewer victories than VanDerveer.
We’ll still flip through the record books and try to add it all up, for sure. We sometimes tend to make everything about numbers, and college basketball for a stretch tended to make everything about Geno and Pat and Pat and Geno. It’s not.
Auriemma recognized reaching the milestone when asked about it early in his half-hour post-game press conference Saturday and got in and out of the topic quickly. And then the event proceeded as usual — with question after question and painstaking analysis of just about every player on his team. It’s been this way, game in and game out, for a while.
Imagine that in, say, 1987? There were hardly any press conferences back when
UConn’s Big East goal was simply to keep up with Villanova and Providence, and even into the 1990s after UConn reached the Final Four for the first time in 1991.
“Thirty-something years later,” Auriemma joked, “take the knife out of my ears.”
The 1994-95 season changed everything, of course. There’s no number that can represent the buzz in the building when second-ranked UConn welcomed top-ranked Tennessee to Gampel Pavilion on Martin Luther King Day. There was a new number attached to the Huskies after a 77-66 victory, No. 1 in the nation for the first time in program history.
Auriemma on Saturday called that game, the first Geno and Pat matchup, “the single moment in Connecticut basketball history that probably pushed that snowball down the hill for the very first time.”
The Huskies defeated Tennessee for their first national title nearly three months later in Minneapolis.
“Magical year,” Auriemma said. “Seems like a lifetime ago.”
Saturday wasn’t about adding anything to the UConn-Tennessee tale of the tape, really.
It was about another step forward in this bizarre season players and coaches have been forced to navigate. The number that matters more than anything right now is, as Auriemma said, 13. That is the minimum amount of games a team needs to play in order to qualify for the NCAA Tournament.
Saturday wasn’t the smoothest day for the Huskies. Forget the numbers in the final score. The game featured an early substitution wave — three players in, three out — as
UConn was flat. At one point, Auriemma walked away from the huddle and handed the clipboard to freshman Autumn Chassion.
“You know, Autumn got a 4.0,” Auriemma said of the walkon’s GPA. “I never got a 4.0. So maybe the players know that, and I thought they’d be more interested in listing to someone who was smarter than them and smarter than me. What I was saying wasn’t really registering.”
The beauty of basketball is the teaching and learning. It never stops. The championship moments documented and the countless moments leading up to those victories have made this special for parts of five decades. On Saturday, Auriemma handed the clipboard to a kid from Louisiana and later was playfully grilled by his latest prized recruit, a Minneapolis kid born six-plus years after UConn’s first national championship.
“Coach, your hair looks really fluffy and fresh,” said Paige Bueckers, joining the Zoom call over the shoulder of sports information director Anna Labonte. “What kind of product did you use?”
How many press conferences has Auriemma held over the years? There’s no way to count. There are all sorts of numbers that can be used to explain what has taken place in the past 10 or 20 or 36 years, but there’s not a number for everything.
Auriemma has the basketball from most of his milestone victories lined up in his office but wouldn’t remember where, or against what team, those games took place if they weren’t labeled.
Equally important to any milestone is the broader picture — where UConn has been, who has been a part of it, how much has changed and how much continues to. There are goals ahead, an infinite amount of meaningful experiences that will be strung together in some way by a bunch of digits.
Reaching 1,098 means Auriemma has been around a long time and done a lot of great things.
Numbers mean a lot. They don’t mean everything or explain everything, though.
The beauty of basketball is the teaching and learning. It never stops. The championship moments documented and the countless moments leading up to those victories have made this special for parts of five decades. On Saturday, Auriemma handed the clipboard to a kid from Louisiana and later was playfully grilled by his latest prized recruit, a Minneapolis kid born six-plus years after UConn’s first national championship.